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Five year old Ashya King has a brain tumor.
His parents disagree with British socialist healthcare system’s determination of what is the best treatment so they fled with the child to Spain to get what they believe is the best treatment.
But you cannot defy the healthcare bureaucrats in Britain. They issued an Interpol arrest warrant for the child’s parents.
From AP:
Britain has become riveted by the case of little Ashya King, whose parents plucked him from a hospital in southern England and fled to Spain amid a dispute over treatment - with British justice close on the family's heels.Mediation?
Brett and Naghemeh King signaled Monday they would fight extradition, defying doctors and the legal system as a British court considers a ruling on forcing the family to come home.
The Kings are seeking a new type of proton beam radiation therapy that typically costs at least $33,000. The Southampton General Hospital says that more conventional methods have a very high chance of succeeding. It said that while proton beam therapy is effective for some tumors, in other cases "there isn't evidence that this is a beneficial treatment."
The family fled to Spain in hopes of selling a property to obtain enough cash for treatment in the Czech Republic or the United States. Police pursued them. Prosecutors issued an arrest warrant for an offence of cruelty to a person under the age of 16 years, hours after the Southampton hospital realized their patient was gone.
The hospital's medical director, Dr. Michael Marsh, issued a statement late Monday saying that the treatment was discussed with the family.
He expressed sadness that communication with the family had broken down and that "for whatever reason they have lost confidence in us."
Ethicists say the case is unprecedented, and has raised questions of how much power authorities should have in interfering with the will of parents in questions of life and death. While there have been many previous legal tussles over terminal illness issues, there have been few regarding questions over which treatment should be followed.
These kinds of cases normally result from a communication breakdown, said Penney Lewis, professor of law and a medical ethics expert at King's College London. She said parents are typically only prosecuted when they fail to engage with the medical care entirely and the child dies as a result.
Yet Lewis said that when the hospital-family relationship does break down, it does not have to end like this. The parents or hospital could have sought mediation instead with a third party. "Not everything has to end up in court," she said.
This is what happens when the state controls healthcare. The bureaucrats decide healthcare decisions and mere parents are not allowed to question them. Given the appalling bad treatment that has been reported at Britain’s NHS hospitals, who blames those parents for fleeing?
As the left has pushed for single payer healthcare in America, they keep repeating the line that corporations should not make decisions over a person’s healthcare.
No, the left would rather have impersonal government bureaucrats make those decisions.
This is a warning for America. The more government gets its hands into healthcare, the less liberty and less control Americans will have over their own healthcare decisions.
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