Cardiologists at Mass. General, who have prided themselves on placing stents in the sickest of the sick, said they have stopped performing such high-wire acts on some patients, particularly those with advanced cancer who could die within weeks. They acknowledged in a January letter to the state that they realized last year that they were doing angioplasty on "a relatively large number of patients with little hope of survival, and that we needed to modify our practices."And there you have it..."Universal Healthcare" will dictate what is a reasonable treatment. If you are in need of a "hail Mary" toss...or a minor miracle (which happen in medicine every single day)...you are out of luck. Instead, you will be regulated to the "doomed" category...with the unsaid request that you just "hurry up and die already."
State health officials applaud this more conservative approach, saying that doing procedures on patients with scant hope of recovery wastes money and exposes them to unnecessary care and pain.
Do you really want "health officials" (read: government employees) defining the medical treatment you receive and in what capacity of agressiveness?
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