This is a Facebook post written by KFAB contributor and fill-in talk host Joe Herring that we thought you should see.
I've had more than one person ask me how it is possible for a hospital to refuse to permit the parents of a sick child to take him elsewhere for treatment, insisting that the child must remain with the hospital in order to ensure he "dies with dignity."
I speak of young Charlie Gard, the boy in England who has a mitochondrial disorder for which the National Health Service has no treatment, much less a cure.
Charlie's parents raised nearly 2 million dollars to cover the cost of bringing Charlie to the US where an experimental treatment offers hope of significantly extending young Charlie's life, however the government-controlled hospital has refused to release Charlie to his parents, going so far as to go to court to terminate their parental rights to facilitate the hospital's plans to place Charlie on the Liverpool Care Pathway, a supposed palliative care protocol that in function is used to hasten the death of problem patients.
The hospital has prevailed in the lower English courts, the British Supreme Court and the European Court of Human Rights has refused to hear the case.
Charlie Gard remains alive only because the hospital has not yet devised a way to kill him without causing a great outcry among the millions who now know his story.
But why deny him the chance at treatment? Cost isn't the issue, indeed, the NHS would save money by permitting the parents to pay for his treatment privately.
Charlie Gard must die IN the NHS hospital to prove a point - that the NHS is not to be second guessed. You see, a bureaucracy that has grown used to wielding the power of life and death will not risk the embarrassment of having one of their condemned patients surviving under another's care.
They would see that boy dead before risking the embarrassment of being proven wrong.
Socialized medicine is no different than any other governmental system - it requires power over the citizen (backed by the explicit threat of force) to accomplish its policy aims. Similar to taxation, which would be utterly non-existent if made voluntary, socialized medicine must employ coercion to function, as few people would volunteer to have their own life support measures cut off while there is still hope, and even fewer would choose that for their loved ones.
Consequently, in 2005, Parliament passed the Mental Capacity Act, which among other usurpations of common decency, gave the National Health Service the power to declare patients "incapacitated," permitting the placement of such persons onto the Liverpool Care Pathway (billed as a palliative care protocol to ease end of life discomfort, the LCP instead functions as a barely-concealed euthanasia program) without their permission, or the permission of their families.
In fact, once placed under declaration of incapacity under the Act, the NHS doesn't even have to notify the families or even the patient, that food, water and medical treatments are things other people get, but not them.
What they get under the LCP is increasingly higher doses of sedatives only, first to mask the uglier symptoms of withheld nourishment and treatment, then ultimately doses at a level high enough to cause organ failure leading to death.
Hideous to contemplate, and even more repulsive when one finally recognizes that socialized, single-payer medicine cannot sustain itself without exercising that power with a frequency increasing proportionally to inflation and an aging population.
Little Charlie Gard is finding the boot of bureaucratic empire-building planted firmly on his precious, delicate neck - and the pressure of that boot is increasing daily.