How bureaucrats think

Well not all of them I'd guess, though it is only a guess, however bureaucrats running the health service have come up with a novel idea for saving money and it's probably not one anyone with an ounce of decency in their body would have come up with, indeed most of us would not even consider it.
Telegraph.

Health service trusts are “imposing pain and inconvenience” by making patients wait longer than necessary, in some cases as long as four months, the study found.
Executives believe the delays mean some people will remove themselves from lists “either by dying or by paying for their own treatment” claims the report, by an independent watchdog that advises the NHS.
The Co-operation and Competition Panel says the tactic is one of a number used by managers that “excessively constrain” patients’ rights to choose where to be operated upon, and damage hospitals’ ability to compete for planned surgery.
It claims unfair practices are “endemic” in some areas of England and pose a “serious risk” to the Government’s drive to open up the health service to competition.
But managers, who are already rationing surgery for cataracts, hips, knees and tonsils, say they must restrict treatment as the NHS is under orders to make £20 billion of efficiency savings by 2015.

One of the problems that often occurs when various departments are told to go looking for ways to make savings or cuts in expenditure is that those tasked with making the savings rarely if ever see themselves as expendable. In public services, the cuts almost always come in at the frontline services, because those services are rarely if ever asked their opinions as to how to make the service more efficient, mostly because the management know the answers will be to get rid of them rather than the frontline staff. A classic case of never asking a question which you know you wont like the answer too.
This is why most private companies use outside auditors, there's no level of covering their own arses involved in a fixed term contract to see where savings could be made.
Yet you have to admire the bureaucratic mindset (for a given level of admire) in their quest for savings in coming up with the idea of saving money by not spending any on their customers who have probably paid into the system their entire lives.
I'm fairly sure there's a special level of hell reserved for those who did this abominable act of cruelty yet justified it by the savings they made. They really are scum and they really need hanging from a lamppost with piano wire pour encourager les autres.