News

Government-run health care: starving sick babies and children to death

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Here’s a scary story from the UK Daily Mail. (H/T Dan Mitchell)

Excerpt:

Now sick babies go on death pathway: Doctor’s haunting testimony reveals how children are put on end-of-life plan

  • Practice of withdrawing food and fluid by tube being used on young patients
  • Doctor admits starving and dehydrating ten babies to death in neonatal unit
  • Liverpool Care Pathway subject of independent inquiry ordered by ministers
  • Investigation, including child patients, will look at whether cash payments to hospitals to hit death pathway targets have influenced doctors’ decisions

Sick children are being discharged from NHS hospitals to die at home or in hospices on controversial ‘death pathways’.

Until now, end of life regime the Liverpool Care Pathway was thought to have involved only elderly and terminally-ill adults.

But the Mail can reveal the practice of withdrawing food and fluid by tube is being used on young patients as well as severely disabled newborn babies.

One doctor has admitted starving and dehydrating ten babies to death in the neonatal unit of one hospital alone.

Writing in a leading medical journal, the physician revealed the process can take an average of ten days during which a  baby becomes ‘smaller and shrunken’.

The LCP – on which 130,000 elderly and terminally-ill adult patients die each year – is now the subject of an independent inquiry ordered by ministers.

The investigation, which will include child patients, will look at whether cash payments to hospitals to hit death pathway targets have influenced doctors’ decisions.

Read the whole thing, but here’s a snip:

Bernadette Lloyd, a hospice paediatric nurse, has written to the Cabinet Office and the Department of Health to criticise the use of death pathways for children.

She said: ‘The parents feel coerced, at a very traumatic time, into agreeing that this is correct for their child whom they are told by doctors has only has a few days to live. It is very difficult to predict death. I have seen a “reasonable” number of children recover after being taken off the pathway.

‘I have also seen children die in terrible thirst because fluids are withdrawn from them until they die.

‘I witnessed a 14 year-old boy with cancer die with his tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth when doctors refused to give him liquids by tube. His death was agonising for him, and for us nurses to watch. This is euthanasia by the backdoor.’

This is what Democrats believe about health care. When the government runs health care, health stops being about curing sickness and starts being about buying votes. Suddenly, free abortions, breast enlargements, in vitro fertilization, drugs to calm down fatherless children, contraception, HIV/AIDS all become priorities. There are some people out there who want government to pay for the health effects of their own immoral / reckless choices, and that’s what government-run health care is really about. Enabling certain lifestyles that require health care subsidies so those people can live “as good as” traditional morality lifestyles. It’s interesting to note that in countries that have government-run health care, like Canada, doctors and nurses are regularly forced to act against their consciences to murder rather than cure. It’s no surprise because socialists in the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany have essentially the same view of conscience as modern leftists like the Democrat Party.

There isn’t enough money for us to pay people to voluntarily incur health care costs (and other social costs) with their immoral / irresponsible choices. But that’s exactly what happens when you make everything “health care” and then make it “free” in order to buy votes from people like Sandra Fluke. What Democrats do is look for groups that need subsidies or validation and they offer it to them with taxpayer money and laws prohibiting dissent. They essentially take the complete anti-freedom point of view on every question. They hate liberty, and love power. The want to control others and to be adored by those who depend on their benevolent redistribution of other people’s money.

Related posts

News

$100,000 grant to teach young girls to talk to boyfriends about condoms

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The Washington Examiner reports.

Excerpt:

The administration is funding a $100,000 study of pregnant and “at-risk” 14-17-year-old girls on probation in Houston, Texas, to determine ways to help them choose safer lifestyles and avoid pregnancy, including better “condom negotiation” tactics.

The National Institutes of Health, part of the Health and Human Services Department, is providing a University of Houston researcher the money because of the lack of study of female teen juveniles in trouble with the law.

The school said the study, “Choices – Teen: A Bundled Risk Reduction Intervention for Juvenile Justice Females,” will include 30 at-risk girls, ages 14-17, on intensive probation with the Harris County Juvenile Probation Department.

The goal, said the school, is to determine if intervention programs will help the kids make better life decisions.

According to Danielle Parish, the assistant professor at the school’s Graduate College of Social Work who is conducting the NIH-funded effort, one of the big problems young girls need to learn is how to talk their boyfriends into using condoms.

Here’s the professor’s web page. This is where “stimulus” spending goes. It’s taking money from workers and their employers to give it to social work professors who want to normalize and facilitate premarital sex.

Polemics

A simple explanation of middle knowledge by Dr. Craig Blomberg

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This article is from Denver Seminary, where Dr. Blomberg and Dr. Groothuis both teach.

Excerpt:

Middle knowledge is a proposed solution to predestination vs. free will, to divine sovereignty and human responsibility, going all the way back to the medieval Jesuit priest Molina (so sometimes it’s also called Molinism).

Classic Calvinists, properly concerned to safeguard divine sovereignty, have typically rejected any theological system that bases God’s predestining activity on the basis merely of his foreknowledge of how humans will respond to the gospel, because they’re convinced that makes human free choice the ultimate determiner. Romans 8:29, of course, doesbase predestination on God’s foreknowledge, but the Calvinist typically argues that the Greek prōginoskō (“foreknow”) there begins already to shade over into the idea of election because in the Old Testament the Hebrew yādā‘ (“know”) often appears roughly synonymous with “choose.” That would explain why Paul doesn’t say just that those whom God foreknew he also predestined, which could be seen as tautologous, but “predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son.”

Classic Arminians and Wesleyans, properly concerned to safeguard human freedom and accountability, have typically rejected any theological system that bases God’s predestining activity on the basis merely of his gratuitous election, because they’re convinced that makes human free choice ultimately a chimera. They often point out that prōginoskō is not the same verb as just ginoskō (which the LXX uses to translate yādā‘ and that in Greek it most commonly means simple knowledge in advance. Thus predestination is based on God’s foreknowledge.

Middle knowledge argues for both! If open theism in recent years has diminished divine omniscience more than orthodoxy has classically permitted, middle knowledge magnifies or expands God’s omniscience beyond what most people have thought about. But it makes good sense: middle knowledge claims that God’s perfect, infinite knowledge must be able to know not only what sentient creatures will freely choose in all situations in their lives but what everyone would do in every possible situation that they could confront. Even more magnificently, divine and unlimited knowledge must be able to discern what all possibly created beings would do in all possible situations (or, as philosophers like to say, all possible worlds).

So far so good, I hope. Now here’s the rub. Because there will only ever have been a finite number of humans created before God brings this world as we know it to an end, that means there remain countless uncreated beings that he could have chosen to create but didn’t. So God’s very choice to create you and me and not various other people he could have is an act of his sovereign election utterly prior to our existence. Calvinists should be happy. But it is based on knowing what we will and would do in all actual and all possible situations. Arminians should be happy. Thus, William Lane Craig in The Only Wise God defends this view from a libertarian Arminian perspective; Alvin Plantinga in a chapel talk at Denver Seminary years ago did the same from a libertarian Calvinist perspective, and Terrance Tiessen in Providence and Prayer does so from a compatibilist Calvinist perspective.

Somebody in the comments mentions that even Paul Helm has written positively about middle knowledge. Middle Knowledge shows what is going on under the hood of classical Calvinism, which affirms both the sovereignty of God and the responsibility of man. Middle knowledge explains how God can achieve both goals simultaneously.

The apostle Paul has this to say in Acts 17:22-31:

22 So Paul stood in the midst of the Areopagus and said, “Men of Athens, I observe that you are very religious in all respects.
23 “For while I was passing through and examining the objects of your worship, I also found an altar with this inscription, ‘ N D ‘ Therefore what you worship in ignorance, this I proclaim to you.
24 “The God who made the world and all things in it, since He is Lord of heaven and earth, does not dwell in temples made with hands;
25 nor is He served by human hands, as though He needed anything, since He Himself gives to all people life and breath and all things;
26 and He made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined their appointed times and the boundaries of their habitation,
27 that they would seek God, if perhaps they might grope for Him and find Him, though He is not far from each one of us;
28 for in Him we live and move and exist, as even some of your own poets have said, ‘For we also are His children.’
29 “Being then the children of God, we ought not to think that the Divine Nature is like gold or silver or stone, an image formed by the art and thought of man.
30 “Therefore having overlooked the times of ignorance, God is now declaring to men that all people everywhere should repent,
31 because He has fixed a day in which He will judge the world in righteousness through a Man whom He has appointed, having furnished proof to all men by raising Him from the dead.”

In this research paper, Craig explains in detail what middle knowledge is, and how it works to resolve problems, like “what about those who have never heard of Jesus?” and “how can we reconcile divine sovereignty and human freedom and responsibility?” Highly recommended tool for your tool chest.