A few days away from a Supreme Court ruling on the the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act(Obamacare to detractors) comes some sobering claims from Britain, which already has nationalized health care.

Professor Patrick Pullicino, a consulting neurologist for East Kent Hospitals and Professor of Clinical Neurosciences at the University of Kent, says National Health Service (NHS) doctors in the UK are prematurely ending the lives of thousands of elderly hospital patients because they are difficult to manage or to free up beds.

Pullicino claims the Liverpool Care Pathway, created in the 1990s and implemented by the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence in 2004, is basically a ‘death pathway’ and simply 'backdoor' euthanasia of the elderly. He says there has been too often a lack of clear evidence for initiating the LCP in patients, which includes withdrawal of treatment, including water and nourishment by tube, and on average means a patient dies within 33 hours. 

Obviously some terminally ill people would die within 33 hours - denying an elderly sick person water can certainly help do that - but he contends that of the 450,000 deaths of people under NHS care each year, 130,000 are patients who were on the LCP; too many patients are put on it pathway without a proper analysis of their condition. 

‘Predicting death in a time frame of three to four days, or even at any other specific time, is not possible scientifically," Pullicino told Steve Doughty of the Daily Mail. "This determination in the LCP leads to a self-fulfilling prophecy. The personal views of the physician or other medical team members of perceived quality of life or low likelihood of a good outcome are probably central in putting a patient on the LCP.

"If we accept the Liverpool Care Pathway we accept that euthanasia is part of the standard way of dying as it is now associated with 29 per cent of NHS deaths."

A Department of Health spokesperson said, "The Liverpool Care Pathway is not euthanasia and we do not recognise these figures. The pathway is recommended by NICE and has overwhelming support from clinicians – at home and abroad – including the Royal College of Physicians."