DNR   disturbing trend -keep your eyes open

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Seniors given secret 'do not resuscitate' orders

Old and in the way? Not for long if you're unlucky enough to land in a British hospital, where seniors are routinely left to die under secret "do not resuscitate" orders.

Those orders are among the most difficult, painful, and intimate decisions you and your family could ever make -- but it's being stolen from you by doctors, nurses, and even office clerks who think they can play God.

Now, it doesn't matter what YOU want: If THEY think you're too sick -- or, more likely, too expensive -- to get even the smallest life-saving measures, you're put on the DNR list… and no one will even bother to tell you or your family that your days are numbered.

There's no other way to put it, folks -- that's a secret death order, and they're being issued in hospitals across the U.K.

In one major facility, Queen Elizabeth Hospital, investigators found no evidence that ANY of the DNR orders on file were issued with the knowledge and consent of the patients or their families.

At another hospital, a patient was left to die because a clerk had slipped a BLANK do-not-resuscitate form into his file. It hadn't been signed by anyone -- not the patient, not his family and not his doctors.

As a one-time mistake, that alone ranks as "unforgivable."

But this one is much worse than that -- because it wasn't a one-time mistake. Maybe it wasn't even a mistake at all -- because investigators found that clerks at this hospital routinely put blank DNR orders into patients' files.

Life-or-death decisions, made by filing clerks -- this is straight out of Kafka.

Action on Elder Abuse, a British charity, has taken to calling these secret DNR orders "euthanasia by the backdoor," but it's so systematic that I don't think there's anything "backdoor" about it. It sounds more like "euthanasia by committee" to me -- and you don't get a seat on that committee.

The phrase "death panel" comes to mind as well, except there's not even a "panel" anymore -- just a clerk with a Xerox machine.

And if you think this can only happen in the U.K., think again -- because the authors of ObamaCare believe Britain's fatally flawed model of socialized medicine is something we should aspire to.

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