QUESTION 2: Why don’t people see what can happen to control over their lives and the lives of their loved ones in government-run health care?

From the UK, the slippery-slope march continues (HT S.O.B. Alliance Member Large Bill):

Girl, 2, ’should be allowed to die’
Published: 25 February 2006

A High Court judge has ruled that the profoundly disabled girl Charlotte Wyatt should be allowed to die if doctors believe it to be in her best interests.

The new order overturns a ruling made last October that the two-year-old had improved to the point where she should be be ventilated if she stopped breathing.

Lawyers for Portsmouth Hospital went back to the High Court on Thursday after “a very significant” deterioration in her condition. She is suffering from an aggressive viral infection that is making it difficult for her to breathe.

Doctors said the next 24 hours were crucial. Charlotte is receiving oxygen through a box around her head but the clinicians treating her wanted the right not to put her on an artificial ventilator, arguing that aggressive resuscitation would only prolong her suffering. Her parents, Darren and Debbie Wyatt, say she should be given every possible treatment to keep her alive.

Mr. Justice Hedley said: “The circumstances have now arisen where the court should make clear that in the best interests of Charlotte, the medical profession should be free to refrain from intervention by the way of intubation and ventilation. The test that the court uses is what is in the best interests of Charlotte.”

I don’t know whether there is any further avenue of appeal. It appears not.

So the Court’s test is based on Charlotte’s “best interests.” The determination as to what is in her “best interests” is in the hands of doctors, who in a national healthcare system are representatives of the state. The parents apparently have no input short of public pressure.

This is state-sponsored murder. It is a potential deadly hazard of any nationalized healthcare system (and a lesser though still-existing hazard of an insurance-driven system), where care can be withheld in the name of the “greater good,” masked as “compassion” for the suffering of those whose only crime was to be in need of intensive care to stay alive.

As Large Bill asks, “How does that Hippocratic Oath go again?” (in part, “I will prescribe regimens for the good of my patients according to my ability and my judgment and never do harm to anyone. To please no one will I prescribe a deadly drug nor give advice which may cause his death.”)
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UPDATE: Michelle Malkin is on it, with a picture. The parents have a blog. Pro Life Blogs looks to be a good up-to-the-minute source.

UPDATE 2 — Other reax:

• Right Wing Nut House — “….. the socialized medical systems that look upon humans as numbers on a chart rather than living, breathing, laughing, cuddling, thinking beings simply can’t tolerate an individual hogging more than their fair share of medical resources to stay alive. Best put the beast down, pat the parents on the head, and tell them to run along and not bother them with their silly notions of parental love and responsibility. Welcome to the Brave New World.”
• Outside the Beltway — “It may well be that the doctors are right and that the parents are clinging to false hope out of sheer desperation. One would think, though, that the decision would be theirs. Unfortunately, when the state pays for health care, it gets to make these decisions.”
• California Conservative — “Is this the direction America is headed? Is this where the ACLU, and the “right to die” folks will take us?”
• Rottweiler Puppy — “Also of concern, though, is where this leaves the care profoundly disabled people receive in Britain. After all, Charlotte isn’t a dying child (leastways, she wouldn’t be if the people paid to care for her actually did so), and she isn’t in constant pain. No, what this case has always been about is the belief of legal and medical ghouls that some lives are just not worth saving.” Bingo.
• Virtue Blog — “Some things are so profoundly wrong . . . And this is one of them.”

Another media political coverage post:
I have to wonder how a blog for a newspaper in a town over 200 miles away (The Cleveland Plain Dealer’s Openers Blog) manages to catch a story relevant to Southwest Ohio’s 2nd Congressional District, while the blog of Cincinnati’s newspaper, and the paper itself, have had nothing (Hat Tips to OH02 and NixGuy).

Howard reports at The Cincinnati Enquirer’s Invisibler’s Politics Extra blog (second paragraph):

In a vote by 80 executive committee members, (Marc) Dann took 67 votes to 22 for Subodh Chandra, who was law director for the city of Cleveland under former mayor Jane Campbell.

What, did nine Executive Committee members vote twice?

(Maybe one member voted ten times.)

Yesterday, my January 21 NewsBusters piece on Farris Hassan, the Florida teenager whose excellent adventure to Iraq last December garnered sugary writeups from the WORMs (Worn-Out Reactionary Media, known to most as The Mainstream Media), but whose real story has more holes in it than Swiss cheese, was recognized and excerpted in February 24’s cover story at the Canada Free Press (CFP) by Editor and Owner Judi McLeod. CFP appears to be a rough Canadian equivalent of the USA’s WorldNetDaily. Fine by me if they spell my name right, which they did once ….. and didn’t once. Oh well.

The BizzyBlog cross-posting on Hassan is here.

Also, on February 14, Geoff Metcalf at Accuracy in Media wrote, “Cinamon Stillwell and Tom Blumer at NewsBusters.org are doing stuff that MSNBC and AP ’should’ have done before providing the teenager a national/international forum and 15-minutes of fame.” I’ll agree with that, though I think my role has been overplayed (I merely assembled pieces from different stories), and I hope the story doesn’t die until a little more sunlight seeps in.

I received a robocall Friday evening that asked these 5 questions, all with yes, no, or I don’t know as the possible choices:

1. Do you support President Bush in the War in Iraq?
2. Do you think we should negotiate for the release of hostages in Iraq?
3. Should air marshals have shot and killed Rigoberto Alpizar in Miami a few months ago?
4. Do you think the economy is in better or worse shape than it was a year ago?
5. Do you think Jeb Bush would be a good candidate for President in 2008?

Hmm.

I caught this at Kausfiles Thursday (HT Instapundit):

The New Road to Riches: Public radio! …Minnesota Public Radio is resisting a state law requiring that it disclose salaries over $100,000 if it wants to keep getting state subsidies:

(excerpt from unlinked source)
[State Rep. Marty] Seifert said MPR would rather skip the state money than list its salaries. MPR had received state money in the past, and Seifert said the $500,000 salary of MPR’s chief executive officer William Kling was one of the motivations for his legislation. [Emph. added]

The Mickster didn’t provide a link (tsk tsk), but here’s a different excerpt from an AP story on the topic:

Minnesota Public Radio in dispute over salary disclosure

MARSHALL, Minn. - Minnesota Public Radio, in the middle of one of its regular fund drives for listener contributions, has so far turned down a lot of money from the state of Minnesota.

State Rep. Marty Seifert, R-Marshall, said MPR has refused $380,000 in state appropriations in the current fiscal biennium. He said Tuesday that MPR’s stance is in response to a new law requiring them to make a public list of the wages of all positions that pay more than $100,000.

….. MPR, like other nonprofits, must disclose many compensation details in federal tax return forms that are available to the public. The forms list names and salaries of the five highest-paid employees and of officers or trustees.

On the 2004 tax return, MPR listed the names and salaries of 13 officers or trustees, 12 of whom earned more than $100,000. Kling received $326,700 in salary, pension and benefits, and incentive compensation at MPR. He earns roughly an additional $218,000 from American Public Media Group, the parent company of MPR.

The top five highest-paid employees earned from $117,845 to $174,040, plus benefits and deferred compensation.

Something tells me the resistance is there because there are many more employees getting paid more than $100K.

It turns out that stratospheric salaries are not unusual in public radio.

A review of the latest available Form 990 tax return of National Public Radio, Inc. in Washington for the fiscal year ended September 30, 2004 indicates that all but one of its 16 officers were paid over $138,000; the one who didn’t got “only” $104,000 for 24 hours of work per week (tax returns for major not-for-profit entities are available to anyone at Guidestar.org after going through a registration process to get a user name and password).

The talent at NPR in Washington did even better that year. Of the five top-paid non-officers (required to be listed on the tax return as noted previously), four of them were paid between $229,000 and $250,000, and now-retired Morning Edition anchor Bob Edwards was paid $477,000. The return also discloses that an astonishing 578 of its 784 employees were paid over $50,000.

I also couldn’t help but notice that NPR in Washington spent exactly $1,000,000 in 2001, 2002, and 2003 on lobbying, presumably to keep the taxpayer money flowing to pay those bloated salaries.

The Form 990 for the WGBH family of broadcasting outlets in Boston identifies ten officers in its fiscal year ended August 31, 2004 who got paid between $106,000 and $250,000, shows a top five non-officer group that got paid between $182,000 and $210,000, and says that 572 of its 1,186 employees were paid over $50,000.

For all the money people in public broadcasting are getting paid, all out of donations from the government (i.e. taxpayers), corporations, and individuals, it’s quite amazing how few nice things public radio reporters have to say about the direction of the current government, how automatically dubious they are about the ethics of corporate officers in the for-profit sector, and how much contempt they seem to have for people who don’t share their elitist viewpoints.

Those pledge drive pleadings are starting to ring a bit hollow, don’t you think?

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.

Wizbang Weekend Carnival participant.

From Stars & Stripes (HT S.O.B. Alliance Member Camp Katrina):

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