I guess the UK's National Health Service is staffed with fans of Invasion of the Body Snatchers:
The UK Nanny State just revealed its latest agenda item and it is decidedly ghoulish. Last week, British (but really Scottish) Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, announced his support of a Labour government plan to snatch the body parts of any citizen. The good news is that this policy only applies to dead people. The bad news is obvious. This is the ultimate death tax, surgically extracted.
Without any apparent squeamishness, Gordon Brown backed the Presumed Consent Scheme (they often call programs “schemes” in England) to redress the demand for transplanted organs by fiat. Here’s the deal. Rather than go looking for those bothersome donor cards on a fresh cadaver, the British populace is now fair game. If you don’t specifically carry a card saying “leave my corpse alone” -- known as “the opt out option”, or unless one’s family is on hand to object, one’s remains are considered fair game for an organ harvest festival.
The justification for adopting Presumed Consent is a function of a recognized market deficit. The Government has noticed that 1000 patients die annually while waiting for a critically-needed transplant. Another 8000 are on various organ waiting lists hoping to get lucky when they go critical or for just the right replacement part to turn up in the chop shop.
According to the NHS Organ Donor Registry, there are more than 14 million Brits who have voluntarily listed themselves as donors, however, one third of all families refuse consent for organ donation when a loved one dies, usually in unexpected circumstances. In typical fashion, the government plans to overcome this donor reluctance by setting up -- you guessed it -- a new Task Force to enlighten the populace about the importance of giving this gift of life.
Read the whole thing... as usual, the link is in the title of this post.
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