A Medical System That Sacrifices the Weak

A COVID-19 inquiry in Scotland has revealed that disabled people in the country were secretly given do-not-resuscitate (DNR) orders, only to find out much later when they visited doctor’s offices or hospitals. In other cases, receptionists at doctors’ offices called disabled patients who were on file and encouraged them to consent to the change. Elderly patients reported at the COVID-19 inquiry that they had acquiesced to the request merely to please assertive receptionists. An unknown number of patients died because they were denied the medical care that they had wanted to receive.

It was a policy of deciding who was to live and die based upon who was most costly to the State. Such becomes the method of evaluation whenever a healthcare system is nationalized. It’s the same decision-making that has resulted in a growing list of dead children in the UK, removed from care against the wishes of their parents. In the most recent case, that of Indi Gregory, the parents were not even allowed to relocate their child to Italy for care, as if England neither wanted to bear the cost of healthcare nor risk the international humiliation of others doing so.

This is not to suggest that the American healthcare model is somehow a beacon of morality, but the worst of man is seen whenever people are shielded from accountability for their decisions. Americans would do well to keep a wary eye on the UK's National Health Service. Government-run systems place bureaucratic decision makers far from the public eye. They can thus make their decisions without fear of repercussion or public shaming.

Those within Scotland’s healthcare system who applied do-not-resuscitate orders to people against their will, judged that those individuals were less valuable as human beings. In the most frank of terms: the disabled didn’t need to be kept alive. Those individuals could not justify their existence. Worse still—bureaucrats arrogated to themselves the right to decide that some people's lives weren't worth any effort or expense. If that kind of arrogance is tolerated, then no one is safe. Such is the evil of this worldview. It calls people to be reduced to a numerical evaluation and finds them wanting if their expense is greater than their quantifiable output. The bureaucratic machine only saw numbers, and was incapable of seeing the uniqueness and dignity of each person.

In some sense, that’s what happened at scale during COVID. People were reduced to commodities, in a manner analogous to slavery. Elitists made decisions about people’s health that would require a type of ownership to enforce. Those who refused to obey their masters were the victims of a social engineering campaign that divided families, incarcerated partiers, fined hikers, and ultimately killed the disabled.

This flu—elevated to the levels of a Black Death by a joint media and government comradery—supposedly necessitated a reduction of care for the most vulnerable. That action caused death rates to rise, the numbers of which were then used to justify more authoritarian control of the populace. It’s circular.

What’s telling is that nobody reasonably expects there to be murder (or even manslaughter) charges against those who applied DNR statuses to unknowing victims. Let us remove the white coats and societal authority given to medical personnel. If a layman secretly entered a doctor’s office out-of-hours and added a DNR to his father’s chart, who later died while medical personnel stood by, he would be charged, should the crime be discovered. Yet, that’s exactly what happened, only with institutional acceptance. While it’s true that catastrophes on a scale are easier swept away, or as Stalin apparently said, “a single death is a tragedy, a million deaths are a statistic”, there is more to this.

The medical industry has gained such social, financial, and governmental power that the industry is immune from moral condemnation. There is a cultish fervor in the trust toward the industry that supposedly embodies science—a deity of the modern age. Sure, we are expectant of treatments changing over time or even being proven ineffective, but the motivations are good, we assert, and the actions of medical practitioners are moral. But what if they’re not?

What if medical practitioners are only as moral en masse as the culture that produced them? Or, perhaps worse, because they have been through a decade of higher learning that has divorced them from a system of morality and replaced it only with a corporate and malleable standard of “ethics”? Such is the new age, when most of society trusts an institution that denies objective morality. Dark times are on the horizon.