The question above is asked by Chuck Colson in his introduction to a powerful (and really timely) Breakpoint program, one that explores the dire implications of government-run health care.Says, Colson, "In the midst of the very heated debate going on about health care reform, one thing is becoming clearer and clearer—most Americans do not trust the government to make health care decisions for themselves or their families. You don’t have to look far to see that their mistrust is well founded. Check out the British press virtually any day online, and you will find horror story after horror story about what can happen when the power of life and death is handed over to a government bureaucracy."
He then goes on to describe just a few of the latest examples of "checkbook euthanasia" and failure to treat cases reported by the British press -- including preemie Jayden Capewell (see photo at left) who wasn't given medical assistance because he didn't quite fit into the arbitrary bureaucratic slot. "Had he been born only two days later, Jayden would have been given medical assistance and might have survived. But British government guidelines for National Health Service hospitals state: 'If gestational age is certain and less than [22 weeks] it would be considered in the best interests of the baby, and standard practice, for resuscitation not to be carried out.'"
Concludes Colson, "The proper, biblical role of government is to protect the well-being of its citizens—to provide security and promote justice, not to usher them into the next world by denying them medical care.
Do we need health care reform? Of course we do; I’ve said so before. But as Christians, we must not assent to giving unaccountable bureaucrats the power to determine the value of a human life—or to withhold medical care from those whose survival is somehow deemed outside the national interest."
For more on NICE (the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence) which sets up these "cost containment/care containment" rules for Great Britain -- and which is an accurate representation of the kinds of boards that ObamaCare would create -- do check out this post by Wesley Smith from his Secondhand Smoke blog.
In that post Smith talks about the alarming trend in which scientists let the coarsest elements of economic pragmatism trump humane care and the sanctity of life. For instance, he gives as an example a recent editorial in the journal Nature whereby they loudly trumpet the health care rationing schemes of NICE...because those schemes save money and keep doctors from being hassled with useless patients.
Smith reminds us then of this salient passage from his 2004 book, A Consumer’s Guide to a Brave New World.
…[T]he scientific establishment seems to be increasingly insular from the rest of society. It is thus unsurprising—if disturbing—that Bruce Alberts, president of the National Academy of Sciences hubristically told a reporter for the National Journal, “We [scientists] care a lot about how other scientists think about us, and we don’t care a lot about others who are not scientists.”…
Making this even more worrisome, the moral views of the scientists who are supposed to decide these issues on our behalf often do not comport with the general moral sensibilities of society. “Most scientists adopt utilitarian perspectives on ethical and political questions, and they use their values to estimate costs and benefits.” Thus, the NAS’s Alberts admitted that the moral views of the general public sometimes prevent research that scientists’ general utilitarian outlook would cause few qualms. For example, in the 1970s, a public outcry halted the practice of using condemned prisoners in experiments, whereas according to Alberts, “If it was purely up to the scientists, they might accept the idea of doing experiments on death row [because] the person will be dead in six months anyway.”
