Health Care Rationing is N.I.C.E.

One Eternal Day assembles material from a number of sources on how nationalized health care can lead to rationing which can lead to passive euthanasia. The whole post is worth reading, but I call your attention to what is already happening in England:

From Wesley J. Smith’s blog, Secondhand Smoke, a series of posts describing how rationing actually works in a country that has nationalized health care.

In the UK, utilitarian bioethicists control who gets–and who is denied–treatment via the Orwellian named organization NICE (National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence). NICE explicitly uses a quality of life judgment (QALY–quality adjusted life year) to determine which patients are worth treating. It has now denied coverage for anti-dementia medications to mild Alzheimer’s sufferers. From the abstract of the story in the British Medical Journal:

The hopes of people with mild Alzheimer’s disease have been dashed again by the agency that appraises treatments for use by the NHS in England and Wales, which has reaffirmed its original decision to deny them treatment with dementia drugs. The National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) has issued amended guidance but still asserts that the drugs would not be cost effective for the mild stages of the disease.

The acronym of the board “N.I.C.E.” is described as Orwellian, which it is. But it is also the name of an organization in another dystopian novel that renders it even more scary. Before following the link, who can name it? And what would that connection add to the discussion?