By Printus LeBlanc
In his failed presidential bid, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) ran on a platform of socialized medicine, and he is still pushing the issue in the Senate today. The Senator and his fellow travelers hailed government-controlled healthcare as the solution to all problems, despite glaring failures of socialism around the world. For the second time in less than a year, a nation with government-controlled healthcare has sentenced a child to death, and the question must be asked. Why are Democrats trying to infect the U.S. with the same disease that is killing children in the U.K.?
If you have been paying attention to international news, you likely know about British child Alfie Evans. Alfie is the 23-month-old child of Tom and Kate James. Alfie has been at Alder Hey Children’s Hospital since December 2016. The doctors have been unable to diagnose what is wrong with him, but believe it could be a rare degenerative neurological condition, the same condition Charlie Gard had. Another child the U.K. sentenced to death.
The hospital, which is run by the National Health Service (NHS), has decided that it is no longer in the child’s best interest to live, and intended to take him off life support. The parents did not agree with this and have fought the U.K. government to keep their child alive. The family went to court for permission to take their child to Italy for further treatment. The Pope and Italian government recently gotten involved and offered to treat Alfie at Vatican’s Bambino Gesu Children’s Hospital at no cost to the NHS. The Italian Defense Ministry has stated they have a plane on standby ready to retrieve the boy and bring him to the Vatican.
The NHS denied the family’s request to move their son, and by mid-afternoon, on April 25 the family lost their petition to the Court of Appeals. The three judges rejected the families appeal backing the decision of the High Court the previous day. The decision is a death sentence for the child.
How can this happen? How can a hospital filled with doctors and nurses kill a child? Isn’t part of the Hippocratic oath “first, to do no harm”?
This is able to happen because in a nation with socialized medicine, the patients and family do not make decisions, government bureaucrats and courts do. This is what happens when a government gets too much power.
Section 15 of the Mental Capacity Act of 2005 sadly gives the courts in the UK, not parents, guardians or caregivers, the power to make these end-of-life determinations: “Power to make declarations (1)The court may make declarations as to—(a)whether a person has or lacks capacity to make a decision specified in the declaration; (b)whether a person has or lacks capacity to make decisions on such matters as are described in the declaration; (c)the lawfulness or otherwise of any act done, or yet to be done, in relation to that person.” This is a state-run system of death, where courts get to decide to pull the plug even when families are not ready.
When the government has the power to order an action that leads directly to the death of a child in a hospital it runs, doesn’t that seem like too much power?
One must ask, where is the harm in letting the child go to the Vatican? If the Vatican is willing to take on the expenses in providing for the child, why would the NHS be so vehemently against it?
The only entity harmed by letting the child go to the Vatican hospital is the NHS. Perhaps if the child were to go to a non-NHS hospital and improve, the NHS would be utterly embarrassed. In a society with socialized medicine, government-run healthcare must be the ultimate arbiter and never challenged.
Bernie Sanders and his fellow travelers have admitted their goal is complete government control of healthcare. Where are the human rights groups challenging Sen. Sanders and his fellow travelers on the ethics of sentencing a child to death?
In socialized medicine, when the government decides it is time to die, there is nothing to be done about it. This is the lesson that must learned from the debacle at the NHS in the U.K. While in the U.S. we value life and pursue it at all costs, societies with socialized medicine tend to lean towards death. The U.K. should be ashamed of itself for letting this happen, but more importantly, Americans must look at how the right to make decisions over death has been ceded to the government overseas and vow never here.
Printus LeBlanc is a contributing editor at Americans for Limited Government.
