1106 Consequential Euthanasia
The story of Baby Joseph is another one of those stories that needed to be celebrated in the media but wasn’t. More than likely the brush-off was due to the fact that it perfectly demonstrated the failure of Canada’s socialist style government controlled health care system.
Thirteen-month-old Joseph has Leigh Syndrome, a degenerative neurological disease. His case came to light after officials at theLondon(Canada) Health Sciences Centre tried to get the child’s parents’ consent to remove a breathing tube.
The hospital claimed that Joseph was in a persistent vegetative state. When the case was forwarded to the Consent and Capacity Board (CCB), it also ordered termination of life support. ALondonjudge upheld the CCB decree.
Baby Joseph’s parents and advocates were not really asking for much from their “free” government health care system. They simply wanted Joseph to have a tracheotomy. For doctors within the horribly brokenUnited States’ free market system, it would have been a common palliative procedure.
Thanks to the efforts of Priests for Life, a pro-life advocacy group in theU.S., and Cardinal Glennon Children’s Medical Centerin St. Louis, Joseph left Canada and received the end-of-life care he needs and deserves. As of April 21, he was a changed baby; alert and comfortable while having a stable airway that protects his lungs from foreign material.
Normally, for the sake of medical ethics, euthanasia is classified as active or passive. A direct action designed to kill, honor killings and mercy killings for example, are active. When life-preserving benefits are withheld in order to hasten death, most medical ethicists classify it as passive euthanasia.
Observers of the Baby Joseph case would probably assume that the attempted passive euthanasia by one ofCanada’s provincial CCB’s and its judiciary was acceptable. In reality, Joseph Maraachli and his family were victims of something more insidious than even active euthanasia; what will be referred to here as consequential euthanasia.
Consequential euthanasia employs government central planners to impose death on those lives whose preservation is deemed to be less than cost-effective. Purveyors of consequential euthanasia simply allow comparative effectiveness research (CER) to apply the consequences of dispassionate statistics and funding needs. Never mind that one econometric study (University of N.C.) found that the CER approach could cost Americans $1.7 trillion over ten years as well as the equivalent of 34 million life-years.
It may seem harsh, but consequential euthanasia is the necessary fruit of abandoning free market medical systems in favor of detached manipulation of life by government overlords. It breeds the likes of NICE (Britain’s National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence) who, in 2005, recommended that smokers and the obese be refused health care.
To quoteAmerica’s own Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Service Administrator Donald Berwick, “We can make a sensible social decision and say, ‘Well, at this point, to have access to a particular additional benefit [like an innovation that works but costs more] is so expensive that our taxpayers have better use for those funds.” He continued, “The decision is not whether or not we [government] will ration care – the decision is whether we will ration with our eyes open.”
It is so easy to swoon under the utopian dreams of save-us big government. But do we really want to submit the end of our lives to a system that values us in terms of statistics and return on the dollar?