EUROPE: A BABY IS CONDEMNED TO DEATH BY SOCIALIZED MEDICINE:
The point of this is not to save money, but to establish that the government has the power of life and death over its citizens. If I were this baby’s parent, I might be inclined to rub out a few doctors and judges to remind them that the reverse is also true.
American liberals often gaze across the Atlantic with admiration, viewing Europe as the model for our future. They covet Europe’s rail systems, green-energy subsidies, social liberalism, secularism, welfare states and government-run healthcare.
As Washington rings with cries that a Republican health reform bill would kill “hundreds of thousands of people,” consider the desperately sad tale of Charlie Gard, a baby boy sentenced to die by Britain’s National Health Service.
Charlie was born in October with encephalomyopathic mitochondrial DNA depletion syndrome, or MDDS. It has left him crippled and with brain damage. He depends on a ventilator to keep him alive.
We don’t know what’s best for Charlie. But we do know that the British government doesn’t either. Nevertheless the NHS, installed by socialists in the last century, has decided that it will not treat Charlie anymore, although his parents desperately want to save and nuture their son.
Worse yet, and an outrage that boggles the mind, is that the NHS refuses to release Charlie into the care of his parents. Charlie’s mother and father want to bring him to America for an experimental treatment that could help his body work more normally. They have even, through an appeal for charitable donations, raised enough money to bring their son here and get him treated. But the NHS has said it will not release the child, and every court has agreed.
This is the apotheosis of big government. The British state has become the Alpha and the Omega. It has nationalized a child and, implicitly, other children whom it might one day cut off from the love and care of their parents.
The point of this is not to save money, but to establish that the government has the power of life and death over its citizens. If I were this baby’s parent, I might be inclined to rub out a few doctors and judges to remind them that the reverse is also true.
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