Much is being written about a decision in Britain by their National Health Service to let seriously compromized Alfie Evans die. The parents wanted to try basically whatever to keep him going, and who could blame them.
Conservative opinion is strongly opposed to what happened. Let me be devil’s advocate for a bit. Can we agree NHS is a government agency with finite resources, and a populace of 66 million to treat?
Suppose for a moment it would take their entire budget to treat little Alfie, should they do it? How about half their budget? How about 10%? Let me guess you answered “No” to all of those, if not, you are being irrational, utopian, or both. You can stop reading here.
If you answered “No” to any of my hypotheticals above, we’ve established there are limits to what can be spent to save someone, at the expense of others who are, ceteris paribus, equally deserving if not necessarily as cute or heart-warming. Now all we’re arguing about is where those limits lie.
You may believe the NHS was being unduly tight-fisted as regards Alfie Evans, or that they should have let the parents take him to Rome for treatment. You may be right, those are different questions.
In Western society, we have concluded the State has a say in parent-child relations, as manifest by Child Protective Services and the thousands of children taken from parents and placed in foster homes. Combine that interventionist position with a single-payer health system (socialized medicine) and you get cases like Alfie Evans.
The U.K. government, which Brits decided knows best, and in fact is more humane than some screwed-up parents, decided Alfie was a “lost cause” on which it should stop spending scarce resources. The NHS further decided that his parents didn’t “know best” about what should be done, as they couldn’t be expected to make rational decisions about someone they loved.
The state isn’t supposed to make decisions based on whether someone is loved, is it? That’s not “equal treatment under the law.” The NHS’s job is to produce the best health they are able for 66 million souls with the budget they’re given, so triage must happen. They are unable to do everything for everyone.
In many ways it isn’t dissimilar to the thousands of cute puppies and kittens which are put down every week by animal shelters, because nobody wants to adopt them. In an ideal world this wouldn’t happen. We don’t live in that ideal world, we cope the best we can in a world of limited resources.
