OPINION:
Worldwide evangelist Franklin Graham cut to the chase about the Charlie Gard vs. Government life-and-death case that’s being played out in U.K. courts right now, putting it plainly that parents ought to have the final say over their infants’ health care — not bottom-line bureaucrats feeding into their socialist system.
In other words: Socialized medical care sucks. And that means you, Obamacare.
Of course, the Christian leader didn’t use those exact words.
But they were implied.
And they came just around the time little Charlie Gard’s parents, Connie Yates and Chris Gard, were preparing for a court hearing to prove to the judge their baby boy deserved to live a while longer. That hospital staffers ought not be allowed to pull his feeding tube because plenty of experts in Italy and the United States wanted a chance to try and save him with experimental treatments they’d previously tried — with some success.
It’s abysmal for a parent to have to petition for permission to treat a child.
Graham said, in a Facebook post: “As a parent and a grandparent, this is so alarming. Little Charlie Gard’s parents deserve the right to bring him to the U.S. to try to find treatment for him — that shouldn’t even have to be discussed! It’s their prerogative.”
He called the U.K.’s stymying of the parent’s plan “unfathomable,” particularly so because time’s ’a-ticking on treatment. He also spoke of the support the parents have — the 350,000-plus who signed a petition demanding the hospital release the baby, for example.
And then Graham wrote this: “This is one of the dangers of socialized medicine. We need to stay as far away from this as possible here in the United States as healthcare is reorganized!”
Memo to senators: Are you listening?
This is exactly right. No parent whose authority hasn’t already been stripped or restricted due to abuse should have to petition a government body for permission to treat a child.
Socialized medicine, as the U.K. case involving Charlie Gard shows, puts bureaucrats at the helm of making family decisions. America, take note — and flee.
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