One of the challenges of supporting abortion is one must also support the slippery slope argument that there is no absolute right to life. Your right to life is no longer absolute but conditional upon circumstances and values which change over time. Today abortion is considered a legal right to terminate a life. What lies ahead?
Terminating the life of patients to save medical costs within a nationalized healthcare system?
Remember the uproar over the death panels designation by Sarah Palin regarding Obamacare? National healthcare is always sold as extending healthcare to those not covered. Restricting healthcare is never mentioned. But if you give something away that does not make it free. It just means the costs are assumed by the government. Instead, what you give away is your right to choose your own care. You now have to let the government decide what services will be provided. And when costs increase, well the right to life starts turning into the need to justify why you should continue to live.
The real fallout is for those who want to continue to practice medicine without being forced to compromise their ethics. Doctors and other healthcare providers are facing an increasing pressure to gut conscience laws protecting them from being forced to provide services that involve terminating life. When actively terminating lives in order to save costs, a new line will be crossed.
There is a clear difference between withholding new treatment and letting nature take its course and instead deliberately dehydrating someone to kill them as the linked article recommends. Note the phrases used which I highlight below:
The courts should not interfere with doctors who want to dehydrate to death incapacitated patients who are a drain on scarce financial resources, according to an editorial in this week’s edition of the prestigious British Medical Journal.
The judgment, he said, “threaten[s] to skew the delivery of severely resource-limited healthcare services towards providing non-beneficial or minimally beneficial life prolonging treatments including artificial nutrition and hydration to thousands of severely demented patients whose families and friends believe they would not have wanted such treatment”.
There you have it. The real truth regarding what some liberals believe on display for the healthcare issue.
In the first one, you see the liberal mantra common people lack the nuance to make decisions. They simply don’t know what is good for themselves so we must make those decisions for them. Let a government selected professional class of experts (how liberals love experts) make all those hard decisions for us. Not recommendations but make the decision themselves.
In the second one you see the myth that we can deliver a government controlled healthcare system without costs going up. Government control of healthcare is supposed to lower costs. I guess nationalization of healthcare makes sense because there are so many cases where a monopoly has been more efficient than competition in delivery of goods and services. Like a cable TV monopoly for example.
My question is if their focus is on compassion for others why do those supporting liberal policies always require a further reduction on an individual’s right to life?