By: James Lewis
I study biomedical science for a living. I’ve also sampled foreign medical care myself, in Italy, Mexico, Israel, the Netherlands and Sweden. And the United States, needless to say. I’ve never had better treatment anywhere in the world than here in the US, even as a college student, when I was completely broke. I’ve often seen inferior care in other countries, though I respect most of their doctors and medical professionals for their benevolent intentions.
I’ve attended talks by medical doctors in various parts of the world, including lectures proving that Terri Schiavo (or people like her), were overdiagnosed as hopeless, when in fact they might have had a chance to live. It is now estimated that about 40 percent of people diagnosed with Persistent Vegetative State (PVS), like Terri Schiavo, are actually in a“Minimally Conscious State” (MCS). The drug ambien is now being tested to bring people out of coma. The evidence is still not conclusive, but there are promising case histories where it’sworked.
In fact, some significant percentage of wrongly diagnosed PVS patients are fully conscious. They are just in a “locked-in state,” a paralytic state that is easily confused with coma.
The Acute Care doctor I listened to in Belgium stated that he would still send his so-called PVS patients to die, because just he didn’t have the budget to keep them on his Acute Care Unit for more than two weeks. He was belligerent about it.
Such are the joys of socialized medicine. The American system is by far the most compassionate one in the world. The reason for that is very clear: We spend more money on the people who need it the most. We also spend more of our Gross Domestic Product on medical care, period, which is a good thing, not some sort of evil, as the Left tries to spin it. If you had a choice between spending more medical care money on your children or parents, or on your own health, and if it could make a difference, would that be a bad thing? I hope not. I hope we continue to value life and health above socialist notions of “cost to the national kitty.”
Conservatives live in hope. Liberals, like the Netherlands socialized medical system, are willing to give in to despair. Socialists over there are now campaigning to make “medically assisted suicide” a really convenient choice for elderly people. But we know that depression is very common in the elderly, and that severe depression can destroy one’s truthful perception of the world. Severely depressed people often decide to commit suicide when their lives are still filled with hope and love — when seen from the outside. They deserve real medical treatment, not a suicide pill with a smile. Killing is not compassionate.
I had a friend who suddenly committed suicide, a wonderful person, a Vietnam Vet, a fine neuropsychologist, and a great scholar in his own right. He was divorced and lost his job. He did not get accepted by a monastic order he was hoping to join. He became isolated, moved out of state, jumped into a canal and died in early middle age. He did not deserve to die, and the world lost a wonderful, creative man, who contributed a great deal. He could have contributed decades of more important work; not to mention his inherent right to live. He could have helped people in need. He could have healed members of his own family. He could have just lived as a constructive scholar, teacher and therapist. He could have remarried and had children again. In the upshot he gave in to severe depression, misunderstood his own life and his own remarkable talents, and committed suicide.
People like that will now be helped to kill themselves by the socialist medical “care” in the Netherlands. To save money.
But worst of all, ObamaCare may well end up killing the greatest medical system in the world. Just to satisfy the power needs of our radical Left.
Don’t let the power-mad Left kill the best medical system in the world.