We know why they won’t let this family leave the country for treatment. Should Alfie go to Italy and survive, just think how that would make the U.K and its universal healthcare look. On a giant world stage it would be proved they are rationing care and deciding who lives and who dies.
On a side note, what the hell is going on with the U.K lately? Jailing people for speech, banning knives, and rationing care to the severely ill. I give them 20 years before they are in the midst of either a full on 1984 or epic collapse.
IMHO, they are becoming a totalitarian state, disarming the populace, massive surveillance, destroying paternal rights, , actually, 1984 would be optimistic, lets go for total Sharia law in 20 years.
They are saying the parents won’t accept reality but, speaking as a parent myself, I wouldn’t be able to sleep at night if I didn’t think I had exhausted every possibility.
You’d have to shoot me dead to stop me from getting my kid to Italy if that’s what it took. I’d row across the channel and walk from France for a 1% chance of saving him. What the hell happened to Churchill’s UK?
@Alrightmiami19c the monitoring speech thing is spooky. I know the NSA records everything I do. But at least they aren’t jailing people for sedition yet like in Europe/Russia/China.
“Suffice it to say that if Alfie’s parents took him home and refused to feed him, they would be prosecuted for child abuse. If a British hospital does it at the behest of British judges, they’re standing on the side of good and right.”
I think this case is less about socialized medicine and more about parents rights. The doc should have said “we’ve done all we can do, we can do no more, if you want to leave him here well let him down gently, or if you want to take him out, it’s your prerogative.” Maybe the doctor thinks that the parents are making the boy suffer by leaving him attached to those machines, and wants to end his suffering, I dunno… but to start to claim that this is proof that universal healthcare is inherently evil is pretty ridiculous in my opinion…
They are preventing the parents from taking the child to Rome for treatment. Even though it would cost the UK NHS nothing to do so. This is literally a “death panel”. This is what rationing and know it all unacountable government doctors looks like.
I don’t agree with what you’re saying. This is more of a doctor advising, and a court ordering to not prolong the inevitable.
Do I agree with the court? No, not entirely, it should be left up to the parents. If they can afford to take their kid to the hospital in Italy, that’s their prerogative.
Does this show that universal healthcare is an evil institution? No, it does not prove that any more than you can prove that the current system in the US is inherently evil because it over charges people, making healthcare unaffordable or in most cases expensive to the point of becoming an indentured servant to the health system.
If you want universal healthcare, you have to be okay with:
Rationing.
Buearocrats deciding what care you get and taking the decision from you.
They are actually considering starving a sick toddler to end his life. That’s what passes for healthcare at the NHS.
Yes our system means you have to pay for services you receive. Turns out doctors, hospitals and drugs aren’t free, but they don’t starve your baby to death against your will either.
1.) do we not already ration in the US?
2.) trust me, as someone living abroad, it’s not as bad as whoever is telling it says it is. You don’t have to cut through all this red tape just to be checked out to get antibiotics.
Two weeks ago I cut my thumb open and went to the ER (I live in Japan where there is universal healthcare.) the trip to the ER, the Medicine, and the follow up visit cost me around $97, our if pocket because my insurance reimburses me instead of directly paying the hospital. My deductible is $100… i have never heard a Japanese citizen complain about the way they do the healthcare here, in fact, they brag about it quite a bit. That same trip to the ER in the stated prolly woulda cost me ten times the amount.
The high price doesn’t pay for all the research and advancements in medical care, research grants and education funding does.
Also, there’s always this argument about Canadians crossing into the us for treatment, but those ppl posing that argument never talk about how Americans travel to Canada and Mexico for treatments or prescriptions… why is that??
Holy shit the amount of misinformation.
I live in Italy. The “funny” (not so much) thing is that we’ve been trying to let people die for decades here. That’s why they want to move the kid to Italy, there is no end life law yet that allows the parents or doctors to turn off life support.
If this sounds like a good thing to you, you might want to think twice - there have been plenty of cases of people who expressed their will to die before an accident or disease forced them in a bed, and when it happened they still wanted to die.
But they weren’t allowed to, they can’t kill themselves and anyone helping them would be penally charged. Yes, even with a signed paper (like a last will) if you end up completely paralyzed on a bed you can’t die, you’re damned to spend the rest of your life (possibly decades) in a bed, without moving, with your brain still functioning while you shit yourself and are artificially fed.
So yeah, we have the opposite issue here.
Now, I don’t know about UK, but letting the patient die for starving seems like a loophole to avoid penal responsabilities for the doctors. I’m fairly sure (but should check) that the doctors, by law, can deny cures in this specific case, but they can’t actually kill the patients by any means - i.e. they can’t inject a bubble of air into their veins to grant them a quick death.
It’s not a matter of ethics or what the doctors want to do, I’m fairly sure none of the people working in an hospital wants to see someone else starve to death (regardless of any dumb rethorics about evil doctors and bullshit), it’s a matter of what the law prescribes.
And, in all of that, make no mistake. This has nothing to do with universal healthcare and whatever dystopian notion murikans have about it while living in a country that literally leaves people to die just because they don’t have the money for insurance. While someone shivers at the notion of a young kid “starved to death” in the UK, please remind me how many young kids with Leukemia are left to die in the US just because the medical treatments burn into health insurance so fast that after a few months there’s no coverage anymore.
Universal healthcare works and saves a ton of lives, the right to health should be an universal right, not a privilege, that’s what a democratic country would recognize. And if someone wants better treatments, guess what… there are private hospitals and clinics here too, in all Europe.
To add to what atlashrugged has said above if anyone has read the articles it clearly says that none of the doctors in Italy or anywhere else for that matter have offered any sort of treatment or cure they are simply offering to extend his life indefinitely by having him sit in a vegetative state on a machine for the rest of his life. So the real question is not about socialised care or anything else it is about whether you consider it morally right to end suffering or feel that we should preserve life irrespective of the quality of said ‘life’.
My evil capitalist plan has a $100 copay for the ER. That’s what I payed when my wife hurt her foot last year. That’s without a having to pay a 55.95% income tax.
I think in many cases morality is subjective and the individual (in this case the parents) should be making the decision. Not the government. It’s abhorrent that the UK won’t allow the parents to do with their child what they see fit. It would be just as abhorrent if the Italian government forced the child to be on life support if the parents wanted the opposite.