Old and Have Pain? Tough.

The National Health Service, the Obamacare of Britain, has issued new guidelines for pain management:

The Government's drug rationing watchdog says "therapeutic" injections of steroids, such as cortisone, which are used to reduce inflammation, should no longer be offered to patients suffering from persistent lower back pain when the cause is not known.

Instead the National Institute of Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) is ordering doctors to offer patients remedies like acupuncture and osteopathy.

Specialists fear tens of thousands of people, mainly the elderly and frail, will be left to suffer excruciating levels of pain or pay as much as £500 each for private treatment.

The NHS currently issues more than 60,000 treatments of steroid injections every year. NICE said in its guidance it wants to cut this to just 3,000 treatments a year, a move which would save the NHS £33 million.

But the British Pain Society, which represents specialists in the field, has written to NICE calling for the guidelines to be withdrawn after its members warned that they would lead to many patients having to undergo unnecessary and high-risk spinal surgery.

Dr Christopher Wells, a leading specialist in pain relief medicine and the founder of the NHS' first specialist pain clinic, said it was "entirely unacceptable" that conventional treatments used by thousands of patients would be stopped.

"I don't mind whether some people want to try acupuncture, or osteopathy. What concerns me is that to pay for these treatments, specialist clinics which offer vital services are going to be forced to close, leaving patients in significant pain, with nowhere to go."

Just a couple of weeks ago the president was asked at a health care town hall meeting about a 100 year old woman who needed a pacemaker. His response to the daughter was "Maybe you're better off not having the surgery but taking the painkiller".

Of course, the president's lack of medical training was evident since pacemakers are prescribed for arrhythmia problems and not pain, but the cold-hearted sentiment was the same. As I understand it the woman's mother did have the surgery and lived to be 105.

Nationalized health care systems are not about improving quality of life, but about improving bottom lines. It's all about the money, not the health care. Under these plans older people are tossed aside because the state has decided it's not worth the money to save them.