"IT IS BAD enough that you can be refused medical treatment on the NHS for eating, drinking or smoking too much. Now it seems that you can be denied an operation for protesting too much in support of your religious or political beliefs...." Well, not quite, but this particular Hospital has acted dreadfully, I'd say he has his hip replacement in the next couple of weeks at another facility, because of the bad publicity.
"Mr Atkinson sounds like an unpleasant crank, and I am as much in favour of legalised abortion as he is against it. But his treatment (or the lack of it) is a scandal. This is about admitting a man to hospital, not electing him to Parliament. Even unhip old bigots need replacement hips."
Even the Times thinks this is a repellant idea, I'll be surprised if you can find any newspaper, or frankly any half-way reputable organization to support this action.
This is the response of a single hospital, not of the NHS in general, though please note the first quotation above. The NHS unlike most other National Health schemes reserves the right to deny treatment to people who continue to engage in the behavior that got them in trouble in the first place, like continued smoking in lung cancer or post cancer patients or continued drinking in liver patients. Remember Mickey Mantle who could pay for his two new livers, but couldn't stop drinking.
It certainly wouldn't happen in Canada, and I doubt it would happen anywhere else where there is a National Health Service, but it makes a great scare headline even if it is rubbish. I think if you did any sort of checking you would find that this behavior is completely intolerable to virtually anyone who believes in or works in a National Health Care setting.
Rob
Why not? After all, if government owns an industry, it can then control access to that industry as a means to suppress beliefs it finds wrong or just inconvenient: British anti-abortion protestor denied hip replacement by hospital:
IT IS BAD enough that you can be refused medical treatment on the NHS for eating, drinking or smoking too much. Now it seems that you can be denied an operation for protesting too much in support of your religious or political beliefs.
Edward Atkinson, a 75-year-old anti-abortion activist, was jailed recently for 28 days for sending photographs of aborted foetuses to the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in King?s Lynn, Norfolk. That draconian sentence was not deemed punishment enough: the hospital has banned Mr Atkinson from receiving the hip replacement operation he was expecting.
Mr Atkinson sounds like an unpleasant crank, and I am as much in favour of legalised abortion as he is against it. But his treatment (or the lack of it) is a scandal. This is about admitting a man to hospital, not electing him to Parliament. Even unhip old bigots need replacement hips.
Ruth May, the hospital?s chief executive, claims that the ban is justified because the ?offensive? publications he mailed caused ?great distress? to her and her staff and thus contravened the NHS policy of ?zero tolerance?. Some may already feel that such policies make it seem as if a hospital?s priority is to protect its staff against the patients, rather than protecting patients from illness. This case goes farther, equating the posting of offensive photos with punching a nurse on the nose.
I couldn't have said it any better!
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