There's always a price for everything, socialism though builds its promises on a government bureaucracy that will give you a free lunch. But the government bureaucracy isn't free and there's quite a tab to pick up for the lunch too.
The problem with offering a free lunch is that someone still has to pay for it. When doled out by the government medicine comes packaged with a massive bureaucracy to implement, distribute and manage it. Whatever the system may promise, resources are never infinite and hospital wards, doctors and drugs don't grow on trees and it has to be paid for in the end.
Socialized medicine has to carefully stagger what it gives away and lower quality and access to do so. Wards in England are a national disgrace with nursing shortages, mixed sex wards and severe cleanliness problems. France's broken health care system is climbing the ranks of election campaign issues. Waiting times for vital procedure are a serious issue in Canada and in both New York and California, Governors have clashed with unions and hospitals over proposed cuts to state health services. When scrutinized carefully, the free lunch of socialized medicine begins to look more like spoiled leftovers.
In the 19th and the 20th centuries, civic medicine made great strides. Health care and hygiene came to the slums, diseases were fought and conquered. Much of what was accomplished was toted up as further evidence that government programs when applied to social problems could create an ideal society. That of course is the nature of the trap.
As prosperity increased, lifespans also increased and birth rates fell drastically. So drastically that Europe from the English coastline to the Russian tundra is facing the loss of millions of people and the depopulation of entire areas. This would be a severe enough problem in and of itself, but a system in which the pay of a decreasing generation of younger workers is leveraged to provide social services for previous generations of retired citizens cannot survive a gap in the birth rate any more than a building can be built with two stories missing in the middle.
Immigration was meant to fill in that gap and use the expanded population to create a bottom tier of workers paying into the system and overlaying booming third world birth rates over declining first world birth rates. But of course immigration only made things worse. On paper immigration might have seemed like an easy way to make up for a birth rate shortfall, but immigration is not a clone factory stamping out fresh new young workers to take their places at the desks and counters of tomorrow. Immigration meant importing entire families, often in three generations, from the third world, most with health care needs vastly outweighing those of the natives. And then there are the social problems.
Using immigration as a stopgap solution for the birth rate was a thirsty man lost at sea drinking salt water and only placed massive stresses on socialism's free lunch pail. This however was more a problem for the nation’s citizens who bore the burden of government than for the government bureaucracies who serviced them. The bureaucracies were perfectly happy with the infusion of third world immigrants as the problems they brought generated an expansion of the bureaucracy. The bonus crime, diseases and social unrest was manna from heaven because the worse things got, the more funding they could demand and the more programs they could add. Social problems under socialism are the most valuable constituency because they justify the existence of government programs perpetuating a constituency of need.
Western nations found that not only had their social fabric been undermined but formerly peaceful small towns were becoming war zones and health crisis centers with their residents footing the bill. Prosperity created the resources and socialism took them away again. Socialism created the squeeze and immigration only made it worse. Cutting off social services for deadbeat immigrants who were a drain on the system, even the illegal ones, might have been a rational approach but few municipalities in Europe or North America would hear of it. Behind the claims of racism, was the reality that proposing to detach immigrants from the social services teat was as much a sacrilege as proposing to take away a farmer's milk cows when he was expecting years of use from them.
But the squeeze has to come somewhere and that leaves squeezing the elderly and the disabled through euthanasia. And that's exactly the situation we have as a disabled patient in England sues to not be disconnected from life support and an 84 year old man is declared a hopeless case even though his chart reads Awake. Euthanasia is declared to be a human right, but it is not only applied to those who actively wish to die, but to those whom the bureaucracy decides should die. To apportion resources under a socialist system, those who should heal instead become murderers.
The resource shortfall has to be made up from somewhere and the elderly are the least use to the bureaucracy and the most politically vulnerable. After all there are a whole lot of them about and as the health care system becomes burdened by immigrants, someone must make way and that someone is increasingly the lifelong hardworking taxpaying citizen. As immigration further strains the health care system, choices are made. Alfred has to die, so Mahmoud can get treated for three diseases that had formerly been eradicated in the Western world.
A family friend of ours recently passed away because the hospital he was in decided he should die. His feeding tube was disconnected and not reconnected for days despite pleas by his wife who spent weeks sitting and even sleeping at his side. Doctors pressured her time and time again to disconnect him from life support and refused to respond to her questions about his condition. And when she failed to cooperate and collaborate in his death, some unknown consensus was reached and he was helped along.
Another acquaintance some years back discovered that her uncle had been disconnected from life support without her authorization leading to his death. When she demanded answers, she was told, "He lived his life."
He lived his life, is the epitaph of a lot of elderly men and women dying under socialized medicine or perhaps being outright murdered. Eugenics today is a dirty word, but the distinction between eugenics as practiced by Nazi Germany or practiced under socialism today, concerns the definition of "Life Unworthy of Life." Nazi Germany applied it to the mentally ill, the disabled and a variety of categories including the Jews. Today we apply it to the disabled, babies and the elderly, whose "Quality of Life”, that ghastly euphemism, is measured and found wanting.
Peter Singer, one of the moral and ethical authorities of modern medicine, Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University, and laureate professor at the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics at the University of Melbourne, has endorsed killing disabled newborns and the mentally disabled elderly. Singer isn't some obscure crank, he's the leading philosophical inspiration for the animal rights movement.
Singer premises the right to life on "the ability to plan and anticipate one's future." When health care is controlled and doled out by a bureaucracy, the ability to plan and anticipate one's future is taken away from a person along with his humanity and accordingly they find themselves with no right to live. Like Nazi eugenics, such selection targets the weakest and most vulnerable people in a society at the behest of the government.
The most common argument against eugenics has been on racial, rather than moral grounds. Modern eugenics rather than targeting racial minorities, assaults the weakest people on behalf of a shifting immigrant population. The selection is made to prioritize social services for third world immigrants over a nation's own disabled and elderly citizens. The resource gaps created by socialized medicine have to be balanced and the scales weighed. Alfred must die, so that Mahmoud may live.
