Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin warned that the “diabolical” and “heartbreaking” treatment of the 23-month-old British baby Alfie Evans is an example of the “death panel”-like decisions Americans can expect under a fully “socialized rationed healthcare” system.
In a Thursday interview on Breitbart News Tonight with SiriusXM hosts Rebecca Mansour and Joel Pollak, Palin cautioned that “this type of rationed healthcare controlled by government bureaucrats and politicians” is “the road we’re on” if the United States continues down the path towards a totally government-controlled socialized healthcare system.
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Alfie Evans is a critically ill toddler who was recently removed from life support against the wishes of his parents by order of the British government, following a United Kingdom High Court decision on April 11. British authorities also denied the parents’ request to transfer their child to a Vatican-owned children’s hospital for treatment at the invitation of Pope Francis and Vatican officials who offered to cover the child’s healthcare and travel expenses.
Palin said, “The hospital and quote-unquote ‘health care providers’ won’t listen to the parents of Alfie, and of course the parents want to take all these offers from others to help their special needs child who will die under the care of this hospital that is adhering to the socialized rationed health care rules.”
Palin recalled her 2009 Facebook post in which she coined the term “death panel” to warn of the dangers of the Democrats’ push for a government-controlled healthcare system. She wrote:
The Democrats promise that a government health care system will reduce the cost of health care, but as the economist Thomas Sowell has pointed out, government health care will not reduce the cost; it will simply refuse to pay the cost. And who will suffer the most when they ration care? The sick, the elderly, and the disabled, of course. The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama’s “death panel” so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their “level of productivity in society,” whether they are worthy of health care. Such a system is downright evil.
Health care by definition involves life and death decisions. Human rights and human dignity must be at the center of any health care discussion.
Palin reminded listeners that she had been “mocked” and “just about run out of town” for warning about “death panels” during the months leading up to the passage of Obamacare.
Left-wing PolitiFact described her “death panels” comment as its 2009 “Lie of the Year.” The comment inspired such heated debate that President Obama addressed her criticisms in a special joint session of Congress, where he said the idea “that we plan to set up panels of bureaucrats with the power to kill off senior citizens” is a “cynical and irresponsible” lie. However, in the years following the passage of Obamacare, left-wing pundits and Democrats like Howard Dean have openly admitted that Palin was correct that the denial of live-preserving treatment is inevitable within a system of rationed government-controlled health care.
Palin recalled her warning of years ago, “If Obamacare were to include many of the aspects that it in fact did include, rationed health care would certainly be the result. Government would be in control. Obviously the care would have to be rationed. Obviously it would be faceless bureaucrats who have to make the rules of ultimately who lives and who dies, and we’re seeing that play out in Alfie’s case, and it’s absolutely heartbreaking. I think it’s diabolical. I think it’s inhumane what is going on … especially [as] there are offers to help this special needs child. The hospital [and] the bureaucrats … won’t allow the parents to take their precious child and get that care.”
Pollak asked Palin if events surrounding Alfie Evans are illustrative of the future of American health care if the U.S. continues to move towards a fully state-run healthcare system as Obamacare in its current form collapses.
Palin replied, “It’s our future coming down the pike if lackadaisical voters ignore the warnings of the death panels, and if they just assume that Obamacare is in place and it will forever be in place because the GOP — having promised to repeal Obamacare and replace it with something better — still haven’t fulfilled their promise.”
Palin continued, “That’s the road that we’re on … and it is a scary thing. I want everybody to understand that this type of rationed healthcare, controlled by government bureaucrats and politicians, it affects every single person. If you are an adult and your parents are still alive, we’re talking about the elderly being affected, so you have to personalize this and ask yourselves, ‘Do I want government telling me that my parents’ lives are no longer productive, so they’re not worthy of the limited health care that government is going to be able to provide?’”
Palin, whose youngest son has Down syndrome, is an outspoken advocate for the Special Needs community. She noted how Nazi Germany’s eugenics program initially targeted the disabled for termination. “Hitler wanted to get rid of all the special needs children because they were not productive, in his view, and didn’t meet society’s standards of perfection, and he wanted some kind of perfect race,” she said. She warned against empowering the state to “make decisions of who lives and who dies.”
Pollak concurred with Palin’s analysis. “What you say has so much significance,” he said. “I was just in Poland. We were on the March of the Living commemorating the Holocaust, and what you say is correct. Many of the early experiments with state-sanctioned murder under the Nazi regime were not in fact of Jewish people but were eugenicist policies being carried out to rid the population of people that the Nazi ideology suggests should not be allowed to survive and reproduce. … Once you start making those decisions it’s a very slippery slope to just horrible, unbelievable, terrible things. That’s why we have to take this so seriously.”
On Monday, the European Court of Human Rights rejected a case from Alfie Evans’ parents requesting the transfer of their toddler to the Vatican-run children’s hospital for treatment instead of euthanasia in a British hospital.
British authorities deployed law enforcement to guard the hospital where Alfie Evans is being held following a report of an alleged plan to storm the hospital by those opposed to the state’s decision to euthanize the toddler.
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) described the case of Alfie Evans as “a grim reminder that systems of socialized medicine like the National Health Service (NHS) vest the state with power over human lives, transforming citizens into subjects.”
Italian Bishop Francesco Cavina described the British authorities’ denial of Alfie Evans’ parents’ request to accept the Vatican’s invitation to care for their baby as “outside all human logic.”
The director of the Vatican-owned Bambino Gesù children’s hospital said UK authorities are carrying on an “ideological battle” in their refusal to let Alfie Evans be treated elsewhere, adding that the decision betrays “hostility toward the Vatican hospital.”
Breitbart News Tonight broadcasts live Monday through Friday on SiriusXM’s Patriot channel 125 from 9:00 p.m. to midnight Eastern (6:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. Pacific).
Follow Robert Kraychik on Twitter @rkraychik.
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