Posted on 07/25/2017 8:38:38 PM PDT by marshmallow
LONDON, England, July 25, 2017 (LifeSiteNews) – Great Ormond Street Hospital argued in court today that Charlie Gard's parents, who ended their legal fight to save their son from being removed from his ventilator, shouldn't be allowed to take him home to spend his final hours.
It's "absolutely tragic ... to see the hospital fight over this issue," human rights activist Rev. Patrick Mahoney, who is in England helping Charlie's parents, told LifeSiteNews.
Chris Gard and Connie Yates fought for months in British and European courts for the right to take their 11-month-old son, Charlie, to another hospital for treatment for his rare mitochondrial disease. Great Ormond Street Hospital (GOSH) argued that its bureaucrats, not Charlie's parents, should decide his fate. GOSH wanted to remove his ventilator.
Chris and Connie raised more than $1.5 million to transfer him to the U.S. Had Charlie been allowed a transfer months ago, his parents believe cutting-edge treatment could have greatly improved his life.
They announced Monday that they were ending their battle to allow Charlie to be transferred because tests from an American doctor showed Charlie's muscles had been allowed to deteriorate too much while the case was in court. Had the doctor been able to treat Charlie earlier, they say it would not have come to this.
"If Great Ormond Street Hospital had allowed Charlie's parents, which they maintained all along, to go to New York to seek this cutting-edge medical treatment, Charlie most likely would be greatly improved right now," Mahoney said in a Facebook live video outside the Royal Courts of Justice. Now, GOSH is continuing its "extremely distrubing" pattern of arguing against Charlie's parents' rights, he said.
"Great Ormond Street Hospital, which is considered one of the finest children's hospitals in the world, just said in open court they......
(Excerpt) Read more at lifesitenews.com ...
I think that's where the misconception lies. The 20% DO have healthcare, from what I understand. They don't have HEALTH INSURANCE. That's where the rub is. I think if a child were really sick, he/she would be treated. Now, as to how that would be paid for, that is the issue, not the care, yes?
The people making these decisions have addresses.
Just saying.
L
How can you post something like that with no explanation? What’s the sense? WILL you please explain it? Thanks.
The bean-counting, cheese-paring attitude of the NHS reminded me a bit of those posters. Fundamentally, the same mentality.
Or so it seems to me.
I'm mindful of the fact that this is an open forum, and therefore I may not share **fully** what's on my mind.
I think the bureaucrats and decision makers are playing with dynamite here. You've got a situation where you're seriously messing with a man's family, at a time when emotions are high and tempers therefore short. It will take a lot for the first parent to go postal. The second, not so much.
This is the UK, of course. But I'm not a subject, I'm a citizen, and my life and my family belong to me, they aren't on loan to me through the benevolence of bureaucrats and "the law." Mess with that and bear the consequences.
I'm reminded of the Texas saying, "He needed killin'." True and pithy. But who, a poster asks? That father knows; ask him, and a name will pop out. It may not be the person most responsible, but likely the person most egregious. Either will do.
And this:
“And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family?
Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?...
The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin's thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt!
If...if...We didn't love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation.... We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.” --
Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn Quotes (Author of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich)
Words to the wise...
On what grounds do you say that the $1.5 million the parents raised from private donations, wouldn’t even have covered the cost of taking Charlie Gard to the USA?
It seems to me that it wouldn’t in principal be an order of magnitude more expensive then taking an ICU patient on life support from, say, TN to MA, and that might run you $20K, not $1.5M.
I dispute the assertion that the FR threads have, in the main, showcased FReepers letting feelings overcome their reason. Nobody was holding out expectations for a phenomenal full recovery. Nobody was expecting the NHS to pay for it. What I read was FReepers defending the parents’ right to care for their own child with their own resources upon the medical advisement they think best.
Mass slaughter does not advance the Sanctity of Life, my friend.
Though I believe I can recognize rhetorical hyperbole when I see it.
It was never a matter of American taxpayers footing the bill. Charlie Gard’s mother and father had already raised money for his treatment from nongovernment sources.
I read that what was on offer was an oral med w/ monitoring. It was not a case of sophisticated surgery and biotech.
Several thousand people donated $1.5M for Charlie.
Releasing him from the Grand Ormond Street Hospital when requested-— months ago -— would have saved GOSH and the NHS an enormous amount of money.
But they are fighting for a principle, and the principle is: We are the Government, and We own this baby in life and in death.
That’s it.
First, Rev. Patrick Mahoney is an ordained Presbyterian minister and quotes a second medical opinion. He is not asserting personal medical expertise.
Second, though of course I have not read all the threads on this, I have not seen people making ill-founded claims that a different therapeutic approach could “save” Charlie in the sense of correcting his multiple handicaps and restoring him to pristine health. The aim all along was to slow the disease process and see if he had any chance to make some developmental gains.
None of the thousands of donors were putting up money for an Oxford scholarship.
No, the underlying issue was whether the parents, with private funds and donated services, could seek non-NHS medical treatment. It would have saved the NHS a bloody fortune if they had said “YES” six months ago.
They said “NO”.
It was never about the a complete cure. Impossible. It was not about the money.
It was about the totalizing claims of the government as healthcare monopoly.
It was about annihilating parental responsibility, and then putting their Secular Ethics Face on and saying “Who’s your daddy.”
They have WAY too much control.
You might have read this in LifeNews.com, but here’s a snip from my email from Life News:
“..Charlie Gard’s Mom Shouts “What If It Was Your Child” After Judge Says Charlie Will Die in Hospice..”
I pray every day for little Charlie and his parents. They are suffering so much.
I saw that in my email but haven’t had time to post anything.
I will pray for them too. It is just so heartless, it’s almost difficult to think about. Maybe tomorrow I can post some articles, there was a nice one about parents inspired to try to help their baby with a similar condition.
Something good might come out of this tragedy, and more lives might be saved when there are stories like “....parents inspired to try to help their baby with a similar condition.” and I said prayers for these parents and baby as swell.
Charlie’s parents are an inspiration to many.
Those reports are misinformation. Those children are not covered by health insurance, but they certainly do have healthcare.
We were on welfare when I was a kid. When I got sick at the age of 13, I was poked, prodded, subjected to all manner of medical tests. I remember going to the local VA hospital for some very high-tech imaging (I could see my own skull on a TV monitor--that was so cool). Eventually, I had surgery to take care of the problem. And the cost for all this care was covered by the state of California.
If kids do not have healthcare, it is because the system is overrun by too many freeloaders, and liberal society subsidizes the growth of freeloaders.
Thank you for the support.
It takes a certain amount of courage to wade in with the cold hard truth when so many people are screaming that this is an example of the horrors of socialized medicine and how baby Charlie is being murdered.
He actually has received very good care. The outcome would not have been any different had he been an American child.
You're welcome.
I think a combination of factors is going on here. A beautiful young woman and a baby who was undeniably adorable before the illness took its toll make for great photos and tugging of heartstrings. Still, it is always a mystery why a handful of these cases become international causes célèbres while the vast majority of these cases occur in obscurity.
Your absolutely correct, 20% do not have health insurance not healthcare.
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