Editors at Investor’s Business Daily explain the role of single-payer health care in the Alfie Evans case.
Bernie Sanders and many of his fellow Democrats pushing single payer endlessly claim that health care is a “basic human right.” What they never mention is that gaining that one means sacrificing many other rights. Just ask the parents of Alfie Evans.
Alfie died this week in a British hospital after a series of events that, if they’d happened here, would be a serious breakdown in our nation’s health care system and of parental rights.
Back in December 2016, British doctors diagnosed Alfie Evans as having a degenerative neurological condition that they couldn’t identify. As Alfie’s conditioned worsened, officials at the National Health Service decided that Alfie’s condition had deteriorated to the point where he was in a “semi-vegetative state” and would never recover. …
… Alfie had to stay put, no matter what his parents wanted or what other more humane alternatives were available. …
… How are such horrors possible? They are possible because decades ago the British bought into the “single-payer” health care myth. It’s the very same myth that leading Democrats are now insisting we import into the U.S.
The promise was that every British citizen would have the “right” to health care, at no cost to them. What they didn’t know, or understand, was that by putting government in control of paying for health care and dispensing this right also gave the government bureaucrats the ability to decide what care gets provides, who can get it, and under what circumstances.
In gaining the “right” to free health care, the British gave up more fundamental rights — among them, life, liberty, and for parents to make life-or-death decisions about their own children.
