Tag Archives: Charlie Gard

Economic Freedom Has A Lot Of Good Unintended Consequences

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On Wednesday, The Daily Wire posted an article about Oliver Cameron, a baby born in Britain with a tumor in his heart who was denied treatment and funding by the United Kingdom’s National Health Service (NHS). However, unlike the recent story of Charlie Gard, this story has a happy ending.

The article reports:

The couple (Oliver’s parents, parents Lydia and Tim Cameron) did not have the funds to save Oliver, so they resorted to crowdfunding, opening a GoFundMe page and asking the public to donate.

After funding nearly $170,000 on their own and garnering international attention, the NHS’s hand was forced. The government finally announced that they would allow and fund the necessary surgery at Boston Children’s Hospital.

The article continues:

Professor Dominic Wilkinson at the Oxford Centre for Neuroethics said that the pressure was on the NHS to comply due to the recent case of U.K.-based baby Charlie Guard, who was denied medical treatment by the NHS despite other nations offering treatment. “I think the intense attention from the Charlie Gard case is likely to make those decision makers more conscious that they are under greater scrutiny and therefore that they have to be particularly careful in making a fair decision,” he told The Telegraph.

Thankfully, Boston Children’s Hospital was able to perform a successful surgery on 10-month-old baby Oliver in November of 2017. “When they told us Dr. del Nido had removed all of it, we were so happy we just burst into tears,” said mother Lydia, according to the hospital’s site.

Boston Children’s Hospital had the skill and the resources to solve the problem. In a free market (although American medicine is not totally a free market, it is more free than most), the hospital was able to do the research and discover the techniques that saved this child’s life. Socialized medicine only works for those who are not seriously ill (or for the very rich who are able to go elsewhere for medical treatment). In a country with socialized medicine, there is no incentive to do the research needed to solve complex medical problems.

When The Government Decides Who Gets To Live

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The U.K. Guardian is reporting today that Charlie Gard‘s life support will be turned off to prevent him for suffering any further.

The article reports:

At an emotional hearing, in which lawyers as well as relatives were in tears, Charlie’s mother was invited to give a statement before the court.

Standing at the front of the room, choking back tears, with Chris Gard beside her, she told the packed courtroom that the couple had only ever wanted what was best for their “sweet, gorgeous and incredible boy”.

She said the care by Gosh had been second-to-none but that it was now too late to give Charlie the treatment that she and her husband believe would have benefited him

“Charlie is Charlie and we wouldn’t change him for the world. All our efforts are for him, we only want to give him a chance at life,” she said. “There’s one simple reason for Charlie’s muscular deterioration [and] that was time.”

She went on: “We knew in July [the treatment could work] and our poor boy has been left there to lie in hospital without treatment while court battles are fought.”

Herman Cain reports:

Gard will now be moved to pallative care where the NHS will guarantee he dies with dignity.

Essentially, what happened here is that the UK government “ran out the clock” by trapping these poor people in a maze of red tape. Time was of the essence and whatever hope Charlie had dwindled as the days passed. Now, the longshot treatment that was available in the U.S. will no longer work – so they’ve ended their efforts.

This is the future of American healthcare if ObamaCare is not repealed.

If It’s Not About Money, Exactly What Is It About?

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We have all heard the story of little Charlie Gard who is in the hospital in Britain suffering from mitochondrial depletion syndrome, a rare genetic disorder that causes brain damage and prevents muscles from developing. His parents want to remove him from the hospital and seek treatment in America. The hospital (under the British healthcare system) wants to let him ‘die with dignity.’ The parents have offers of medical treatment and care from the Vatican and from medical facilities in America. The parents evidently have the financial means to get him where he needs to be to receive the treatment. Taking him from the hospital where he currently is creates no financial burden for the hospital. So why won’t the hospital let the parents take Charlie Gard out of the hospital? To me, that is the million dollar question.

The American Thinker posted an article today about the impact of single-payer socialized health care on innovation and alternative medicine. The article reminds us that the passage of ObamaCare in 2009 helped establish the idea that health care is a right.

The article includes the following:

The day after the Obamacare vote, the senior member of the House of Representatives, Rep. John Dingell (D-MI), a strong supporter of government-run health care since he first got elected to the Congress in the mid-1950s, appeared as a guest on a local Detroit radio program. I learned about the Dingell interview courtesy of someone in Detroit who heard the broadcast and posted a comment about it at a blog that I stumbled upon. After some research, I was able to identify the Detroit talk show — it was the Paul W. Smith program on radio station WJR — and locate an audio file of the Dingell segment on WJR’s Web site before it scrolled offline.

Sure enough, as he gleefully celebrated the passage of Obamacare on Smith’s program, Dingell blurted out that the Democrats had finally learned how “to control the people:”

The harsh fact of the matter is when you’re going to pass legislation that will cover 300 [million] American people in different ways it takes a long time to do the necessary administrative steps that have to be taken to put the legislation together to control the people.

As I previously noted, the hospital in Britain has no financial interest in keeping Charlie Gard as a patient until he dies–in fact, that is probably against their financial interest. It would seem that ‘control’ might be the only obvious reason for their policy–they don’t want to allow Charlie’s parents to control the medical care their child receives.

The article further reminds us:

Nationalized mandated health care has always been a goal of the collectivist, statist, communist model of governance.

Writing in 2007 in National Review Online, Mark Steyn put it succinctly:

Socialized health care is the single biggest factor in transforming the relationship of the individual to the state.

The article concludes:

It remains to be seen if a new effort by the parents to appeal the court’s decision will prevail. In the meantime, the case illustrates several points. In a socialized, single-payer medical system like the one that has been in place in the UK since the NHS was mandated in 1948, the patient — or in this case, his parents — is not in control; the medical bureaucrats under the color of law have the final say over one’s life and death.

It is also noteworthy that innovative options that might help a patient like Charlie are emanating not from Britain — where socialism and the NHS have hindered medical innovation and impaired successful treatment outcomes — but from the United States, where the practice of medicine has yet to fall under the complete and suffocating yoke of socialism.

We are at a crossroads right now in America. We have a choice. Are we going to be the country envisioned by our Founding Fathers that was a beacon of freedom to the world or are we going to trade our freedom for government control sold to us under the guise of benefits. If the Republicans do not repeal ObamaCare, we can expect to see cases like Charlie Gard begin to appear in America.