“Let me know if you want me to stop killing you.”

“Let me know if you want me to stop killing you.”

There are many reasons to object to government-run health care.  Some would argue that if the government runs it, it will run like everything else in the government:  poorly and corruptly.  Failure by a government program, an extremely poor performing school, for instance, simply results in more money chasing the failure.  Whatever ails the delivery of health care in the U.S. (virtually all of which has been caused by government intervention), granting the administration of this service to the folks at the department of motor vehicles or the TSA doesn’t seem like progress.

Others would say that government-run health care is a bad idea because anything that requires first the theft of an individual for the benefit of another is wrong, no matter what good is claimed to have resulted from the robbery.  The ends never justifies the means.

I think both of these positions are compelling and sufficient.  Here’s another one, though. If you are the medical ward of the state, they want you dead and they will kill you.  Think I’m too harsh?  Read this.  It turns out that 1/3 of patients who die in British hospitals are euthanized.  This is done to save money and to make beds available for more assassinations.  This British hospital path (Green Mile?) down death row is called the “Liverpool Care Pathway.”  This consists of heavy doses of morphine and other sedatives combined with denial of food and water.  Let me see…..I’m checking some of my reference texts….yep that will kill you every time.  Either component alone is sufficient to kill you.  It occurs to me that even condemned death row criminals having been granted a last meal are afforded more courtesy than these poor British patients.

So if you are one of those die-hard universal health care loonies, remember that the government, armed with the power to rob someone down the street to provide for your “free” medical care, also has (and will use) the power to kill you, if some bureaucrat believes treating your medical condition might cost too much or you are no longer useful to the state.  

This is the essence of socialism and fascism, isn’t it?  Everyone exists for the good of the state.  But once the tapeworm of government reduces us to sickness, the machine is actually better off without us, discarding us into a mass grave.  Hayek’s phenomenal book, “The Road to Serfdom” was a warning to the British that while fighting against and vilifying the fascist Germans, the British had embraced many of the ideas of their fascist society.  Looks like the British love for medical fascism has been used to achieve the same “efficiencies” of their former German foes.  

One of the most chilling parts of the article linked to above was the response by one of the government defenders of the use of this Liverpool Care Pathway.  He said that in defense of its use, if once begun a patient shows signs of improvement, it (the Liverpool protocol) is stopped.  So if you struggle while they are killing you, they let up.  No wonder the British, just like Hitler disarmed the populace before they tried this.

G. Keith Smith, M.D.