Robert Klitzman, director of a masters program in bioethics at Columbia University, says Mike Pence’s comments on Charlie Gard are “alarming” because they seek to “undermine single-payer health systems.”
Pence “politicized a tragic story,” Klitzman said, when the vice president told Rush Limbaugh “the American people ought to reflect on the fact that for all the talk on the left about single payer, that’s where it takes us.”
Gard is the 11-month-old British boy suffering from Mitochondrial DNA Depletion Syndrome, a rare disease that would leave him severely and permanently cognitively disabled. His parents want to take him from a hospital in the UK to the United States for experimental treatments that experts say give him a 10 percent chance of survival.