Winston Churchill said that "The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings.  The inherent virtue of Socialism is the equal sharing of miseries."  The latter point is especially true when it comes to socialized medicine.  The system can function only if people with alternatives cannot exercise those alternatives.  If they do, and are successful, the blind faith that keeps the system afloat vanishes.  Britain's National Health Service (NHS) knows this, which is why it holds sick babies as prisoners when their parents attempt to get them alternative care that might save their lives.

The first time Americans became aware of what amounts to medically dictated infanticide in the NHS was in 2017, when the parents of Baby Charlie, a critically ill infant, tried to pull him out of the NHS and take him to America for experimental treatment.  Instead, beginning with the medical establishment and then extending to the entire judicial system, including the European Court of Human Rights, officialdom said absolutely not.  Once the NHS decided that it was better for Charlie to die under its care than for his parents to try to save him, that was the end of the parents' rights.  Charlie died, untreated.

The same thing is happening again in England, but this time with a twist: the baby the NHS is holding prisoner is an Israeli subject, as are his parents:

Israeli President Reuven Rivlin appealed to Prince Charles on Tuesday to allow a critically ill child to be brought to Israel for medical treatment. In May, a British court ruled that Alta Fixler, age 2, should be taken off life support.

"I am writing to you today on a matter of grave and urgent humanitarian importance," wrote Rivlin in a letter to the Prince of Wales.

The court's decision, he continued, contradicted the beliefs of the child's Orthodox Jewish parents, who are also Israeli citizens, and it would be a "tragedy" if their wishes could not be respected.

"Their religious beliefs directly oppose ceasing medical treatment that could extend her life, and [they] have made arrangements for her safe transfer and continued treatment in Israel," he wrote.

[snip]

In May, the U.K. Family Division of the High Court ruled that Alta's parents could not take their daughter to a Jerusalem hospital, agreeing with an earlier decision by the Manchester University NHS Foundation Trust that "there was no prospect of her ever getting better," The Jewish Chronicle reports.

One cannot help but conclude that the "High Court" is less concerned with the baby's well-being than it is with the possibility that its doctors will be proven wrong.  That the baby isn't even a British subject is irrelevant.  The NHS is a roach motel for desperately ill people: once they check in, they don't check out.

Years ago, when Holland first made euthanasia legal, I heard an NPR interview with a Dutchman who said euthanasia was great for Holland but should never be used in America.  The reason, he said, was that Holland had socialized medicine.  In America, where medical costs could bankrupt families, those with terminal illnesses could be actively or passively coerced into turning to euthanasia to save their family's finances.

History has proven that this is bass-ackwards.  The state does not love you.  The state will send people sick with COVID into old age homes, where all the vulnerable patients are.  It might do this out of sheer negligence, or, perhaps, even if only subliminally, it may do this to reduce the economic burden old people put on the state.  After all, they're no longer producing taxable wealth.  They're just using up money that could be better spent finding housing for illegal aliens.  Either way, the family doesn't think that way.  Only the state does.

England's NHS, especially, showed that lack of state love with its Liverpool Care Pathway.  This was meant to be a national hospice program providing palliative care to the terminally ill in their final days.  What ended up happening, when the NHS started running out of money, is that thousands (even tens of thousands) of elderly patients who were terminally ill, but weren't anywhere near death's door, were hastened to their deaths.  They had become too expensive or just too difficult to manage.

When a British judge tells you your child is as good as dead, and that you cannot try to save her life, what he may well be saying is something akin to, "Don't take your child somewhere else and make us look bad.  The only thing that holds the NHS together is the British people's blind faith that they're actually getting good, free health care, rather than minimal health care paid for thanks to excessive taxes."  As always, Winston Churchill was correct.

Image: The Sick Child by Oscar Wergeland.  Public domain.

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