In todays episode of the greatest nation on earth

When they forced that kid to die, and his parents to watch, despite their being potential treatment a simple plane ride away.

It's inexcusable.

I want to know how it makes any kind of sense for a government to be able to refuse to allow parents to seek medical treatment for their child. It boggles my mind that they have that authority.

It sickens me. I'd like to see someone try to defend their decision.

What are we referencing here?

Baby Alfie. https://abcnews.go.com/International/alfie-terminally-ill-british-boy-off-life-support/story?id=54798805

It was the hospital's decision and the court upheld it. Personally I don't really see why they shouldn't have been able to take the kid too Rome, but this isn't some kind of totalitarian overreach by the government.

I'm not sure where the idea of potential treatment is from? If the boy was kept on life support, would he have survived? If the boy was taken to the hospital in Rome, could he have been treated? Because there is little to indicate either. Sure, the hospital should listen to the family in terms of whether to terminate life support or not, but I fail to see how flying him to Italy would have given him a chance.

It was a chance to save him. If it were your child, you'd take the chance no matter how slim it was.

To be flown to the Vatican is not an offer of medical help. He certainly would have been saved, but in a religious sense rather than any physical sense.

He wasn't being flown to the Vatican, he was being flown to a hospital in Italy.

A hospital at the Vatican, which is in Italy.

A hospital that could help him, nonetheless.

Help him how? Surgery, medication, or continuation of life support?

One of the three.

Even if it was just continued life support, it would have at least given them more time in hopes of a treatment option being found. There are medical break throughs every day in one field and form or another.

Any specifics on that? And would it have been any better than what the hospital in Britain had?

Well he wouldn't have been dead, for starters. I'm nit a medical researcher so I don't have specifics in potential treatment avenues and such, but the point is, they were refused that option. Sure, the hospital made the decision to take him off life support, which they should not have that authority to begin with, but the government refused to allow them to move him some place else. The government wasn't going to be footing the bill, it was all being paid for through other sources. They decided the child didn't have a right to live anymore, so they essentially killed a baby, which is ironic given their stance against the death penalty.

They would've given him longer to live as they tried to treat his hypsarrhythima.

And just so it's REAL clear, he was breathing on his own, the hospital withdrew "care and sustenance", meaning they took out his feeding tube and left his starve and dehydrate. Then they refused to allow his family to seek alternate care, and forced them to watch him waste away.

That's pretty much the long and short of it.

Yes, the hospital shouldn't have taken him off of life support without the consent of the parents. However, there's still nothing to indicate that treatment at a Vatican hospital would have given him a different chance. The issue lies solely with how the British hospital where he was at decided to terminate life support on a boy with a very low chance of surviving, and a full recovery would be undoubtedly out of the question.

No, the issue lies in the government getting to decide whether a family is allowed to seek treatment on their own. They were basically prisoners of the state, with no choice, despite having been given Italian citizenship.

Several people from several different countries like the US and Poland extended offers to help him but England refused to let the parents seek out that help.

and this is the point where life loving countries need to start imposing sanctions on governments who start doing shit like that.

Well supposedly UK is life living because they are anti death penalty.

It had nothing to do with quality of healthcare. The UK had decreed to pull all care from the child and let him die. They also refused to allow them to take him somewhere that would keep him on life support. The original post is a reminder that the 2nd Amendment is about our right to bare arms AGAINST THE GOVERNMENT when said government tried to strip away our rights, such as in this case. True, it was badly phrased, but that was the point. It has jack to do with the quality of healthcare.

Italy is crippled with debt mostly from their social programs they cant afford. The concept of socialized medicine is great in theory but it doesn't work. Using Canada and the UK as examples, you end up pushing the least money possible to get the worst doctors/therapists to provide the bare minimum people need. If you're young and have the flu on yeah awesome... but try having a serious illness, most people are SOL... and similar to Italy the UK cant keep up with the rate of requests/claims because there just straight up isnt enough money to keep up with the needs of the expanding population. As another example, in the US, you could tax the top 1% at 100% and only afford Medicare for the nation for about a year, if that, without taking on massive debt to supplement... so it isnt a taxation problem either. Competition drives prices so single payer systems (socialized systems) do nothing for competition and artificially corner markets and all associated end products.

@celticrose I know what the story is about, just wasn't sure whether that was what the post was referring to. And yes I am absolutely in favor of letting the family go to another country for care. I was just saying that if the care in the UK is this bad, then push for change. But many people (conservatives) don't want to have a good healthcare system because "BUT SOCIALISM! AND VENEZUELA!!!"

If you taxed the 1% of America at 100% rate you'd have enough money to give health care for the entire nation for ages up until the entire 1% left for Canada where the ass ton% tax on income there would be cheaper

The top 1% already pay 46% of the taxes and the 30 year deficit income to social expenditures on that is close to -1200%, the top 20% pay 86% of the taxes and the 30 deficit income on that to social expenditures is -3600%. No, you could not give healthcare for the entire nation if you taxed the top 1% at 100%. To your point of them leaving if you did tax them at 100% or even close to it, yes that would be very likely.

Socialized healtjcare does not lead to debt or bad doctors. Look at Scandinavia. Socialized healthcare, no cripling debt because of it and we have some of the best hospitals in the world. I'm not saying the system is perfect, but neither is capitalised healthcare by a long shot.

^exactly, look at Scandinavia, that's a good example, not Venezuela or the Soviet Union the Republicans keep screaming about

even the uk isnt an awful example just their politics got in the way. Their private health care facilities are quite a bit more shit than their NHS ones on average.

Scandinavian countries aren't socialized because they don't nationalize their means of production for anything, they just have extremely high tax rates. Sweden specifically used to be a "tax-and-spend" economy in which some earners were forced to pay 100% of their income. This stunted their economic growth and drove them from being the 4th wealthiest country in the world to the 14th within a 23 year period so they have been pulling the reigns way back... Statistically, now more than ever, there is a larger rise in Scandinavian countries adopting more fiscally conservative policies because the taxation is so high that most people only rent/lease because they cant afford to own anything, increasing the income/asset gap and the debt to equity ratio in these countries (Denmark, Sweden, Norway, etc.) is the highest in the world. The average Dane has debt equal to 310% of his disposable income.

How...how do you have any money if you pay 100% taxes?

All countries have some level of "tax-and-spend" because they need to tax people to spend on certain things, like America spends on its military.
For Sweden, part of becoming the 14th largest economy is probably because other nations started to grow quicker than Sweden. You can probably argue that it's due to their "tax-and-spend" economy.
Scandinavian countries have also started voting more right-wing parties them before, so they want to reduce taxes as it alines with their economic beliefs. Probably, people have more money than just got their rent or debt, Scandinavian countries don't pay for people's food and other expenditures; but not much extra money I guess.

"Tax-and-spend" is a term used to describe 100% taxation and government delegation of expenditures. You are correct that all countries tax their citizens and spend that money to an extent.

@grimreaper is was a sliding scale that lead many people to pay 100%, not all... but you have a very valid point and that was the issue and why they have since walked back on many of their taxation policies.

And this happened several decades ago. I don't know where you got the numbers, but as a citizen of Scandinavia i can tell you that we can afford a lot of things. The renting part sounds like complete bullshit and I'm not even that wealthy. I'm aware Sweden had extreme taxatiom during the cold war era, but that has passed and we have come down to more reasonable numbers. They might still be high, but people like you forget that the money isn't just taken out of the people's pockets for the hell of it, that money goes into the system to mainly benefit the citizen. Healthcare is just one part of that. Some Americans even pay an equal ammount of tax as a swede does, depending on which state they live in. We just choose to spend it on more than an inflated military budget.

Also, as a side note: our conservative political parties aren't as conservative as you might think. If you compare them to the world they're still left leaning. Biggest reason they're becoming more popular is because people are starting to realize that we can't take in more refugees. That's what the big debates are about, not taxation. Though I will admit that the "conservative" parties are more keen on lowering the taxes a bit while the left want to keep then at a higher rate. But it's not a drastic gap.

I'm referencing public OECD figures published by your government. I didnt state that your country was a terrible place or anything like that, all I did was quote published statistics cited by your own country... and you can't compare the US military budget to yours considering the US is 22 times larger and has 22 timed the assets to operate and maintain. You also need to keep in mind that the US Armed Forces aren't just operational in the US/for the US. Poland for example is contracting the US military for the bulk of their needs, as do many Scandinavian countries supplementing US intelligence and naval services.

Also keep in mind that spending and budgets, (military, public works, etc.) are comparable to the GDP for a country. Using Sweden as an example, as of 2016 its GDP was $511 billion USD. In comparison, Texas, a single state in the US, produced a $1.65 trillion USD GDP.

I wasn't talking ammount, I was talking percentage. It's no secret your governemnt spends more money on their miltary than they need to to operate at the same efficiency as they do now. That's what inflated means. You could cut without a doubt cut some of the funding without any negative repercussions.
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On the matter of taxation in Scandinavia I can say that I agree that the economy has been doing as best when the right party was in charge with lower taxes. However that doesn't mean things have been bad during the left party reign either (in recent years, I'm not talking 1970's).
I also want to say that you should always read vetween the lines when reading blatant numbers from statistics because nothing is as simple as numbers and figures.

Again, keep in mind my previous statement on where and how the US is operational. The budget/spending could be cut considerably if the US Armed Forces stopped contracting for other countries, that is absolutely correct and many people in the US believe that should be done and that the US should adopt a more isolationist policy. As far as the statistics and figures go, you're taking this very personally when all I did is quote information published by your government and country... if its inaccurate your problem is with them, not people reading and quoting their reports.

I apologise for being so aggressive. It's just that most of the time people like to use the scandinavian countries as bad examples and state a lot of falsehoods when talking about taxation and healthcare. I've grown defensive since I'm a proud citizen of my country. It's a bad habit of mine.

No worries at all, it's easy to become very passionate very quickly when you're discussing something about your home.