Reason to look at Obamacare the way lambs look at rabid wolves

Killing Alfie

As if we needed another reason to look at Obamacare the way lambs look at rabid wolves, the vaunted British National Healthcare Service (NHS) did us all a solid last week. Forget "death panels," care rationing or forcibly herding people into progressively smaller groups. As daunting as those prospects sound, the NHS reminded us that the logical conclusion of socialized medicine is worse than all the viability means-testing, Russian-novel-length waiting room visits and high-risk pools could hope to be. The United Kingdom's version of former President Barack Obama's grand vision flat out whacked a kid last week.
Twenty-three-month-old Alfie Evans, already facing long odds on surviving infancy, couldn't survive bureaucracy. It's entirely possible that Alfie needed a miracle to make it. Pope Francis, who certainly knows more about miracles than London pencil pushers, begged the Brits to give the kid a chance at finding one. The pencil pushers responded by building a wall of armed police, as if the Holy Father was going to send some kind of Vatican SEAL team to Liverpool. The Brits might not be able to stop an Islamofascist from turning a concert or sidewalk into a killbox for their Allah, but they could keep the Pope from trying to save a kid's life for God.

And it's not like the NHS gets to fall back on the same "cost to society" excuse that bureaucracies have been using to justify their twisted agendas since stone age cultures sent their sick off to die in the bush. When Alfie stubbornly refused to get the hint and die already, the government of Italy offered to literally take the entire nightmare off the NHS's hands by making Alfie a citizen and airlifting him to a children's hospital in Rome. The NHS refused. They were so bent on putting the kid in the ground, they walked into a fiscal and public relations beating, rather than let someone else take a punch. How far down the rabbit hole must you be to blow past "cutting off your nose to spite your face" on your way to "killing babies to spite life?"

This wasn't a redux of the awful Terri Schiavo case, in which the lack of clarity over the patient's own wishes created a nasty subplot. There was no debate between Alfie's parents over his fate. This was a child who proved, by hanging on for days after the government sentenced him to die, that he wanted to live. A son whose parents, like nearly every successful species in the entire animal kingdom, wanted desperately to avoid outliving him. A life struggling to continue. By themselves, starvation, dehydration and suffocation are particularly gruesome ways to die. Thanks to socialized medicine, Alfie had to endure all three, with armed guards there to make sure he didn't escape. You do to a prisoner of war what a government bureaucracy just did to Alfie, you get to book a one-way trip to The Hague, not praise for the "courage of your convictions."

Socialized medicine cut off Alfie's air, water and life support. Socialized medicine surrounded the hospital with police to keep Alfie in, as much as keep people out. Socialized medicine went to court to ensure Alfie would find no quarter, and no quarter would find Alfie. And socialized medicine killed Alfie as surely as if they'd hired a hit man to put a bullet behind his ear.

This is what socialized medicine and its proponents do, kids; they turn us into livestock. They use your tax dollars to weigh and measure you. If you make the grade, you may or may not get a reasonable facsimile of medical attention. If you don't, you die. And as Alfie and his parents learned in the worst way possible, if you won't die, they kill you.

— Ben Crystal