From Tito:

The body that does this is called NICE (National Institute for health and Clinical Excellence) - it has the job of deciding which drugs are available on the NHS.

Ask your average welfare-statist whether or not NICE should approve a life saving drug that costs £0.01 for one years treatment: “Of course!” he will reply. Then ask him whether or not it should approve a drug that costs £100 for a years treatment, he will probably agree again but with less enthusiasm. Now ask him £1000, £100,000 - ask him if its worth 4 times GDP. Eventually he will say no, he will dismiss it as impractical.

Where is this mystery line drawn? What is the intrinsic value of a human life?

Step forth the first immoral politician that dares admit where the line is drawn: something tells me he will be quite unpopular.

For we must check our premises. All value is objective, not intrinsic. Value presupposes the question “Of what value, and to whom?”

As always, the only way out of this swamp of contradiction is to remove the aspect of force. This means a free market in healthcare, a market where a man is free to purchase any treatment he wishes, where he can take any advice he chooses - and where there are no legal limits to the maximum amount of healthcare he can consume in order to survive.

It won’t be long at all before questions like these hit much closer to home. Socialized medicine is an indefensible collaboration of tyrannical notions. In any matter, especially ones where life and death are literally on the line, to harness a man’s ability to make decisions based on his own rational judgment, and according to his own financial means, is the epitome of evil - yet this is precisely the fundamental tenet crucial to any form of socialized medicine.

Of all collectivist schemes, tampering in the field of medicine is the most sinister.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 26th, 2009 at 9:43 am and is filed under Collectivism, Altruism, Medicine. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.