A Warning Signal on Socialized Medicine

Great Britain has socialized medicine, known as the National Health Service.

We may soon have something very much like it, including provisions for allowing bureaucrats to determine when people get certain procedures, transplants, etc.

Here's a story about a 22-year-old dying with cirrhosis of the liver, that you should read before you endorse ObamaCare:

A 22-year-old alcoholic has died after being refused a life-saving liver transplant because he was too ill to leave hospital and prove he could stay sober.

Gary Reinbach, who died in hospital on Monday from a severe case of liver cirrhosis, did not qualify for a donor liver under strict NHS rules.

The alcoholic, from Dagenham, Essex, had admitted binge drinking since he was 13 but was only taken to hospital for the first time with liver problems 10 weeks ago.

He was never discharged.

His mother Madeline Hanshaw, 44, said: "These rules are really unfair."

She told the Evening Standard: "I'm not saying you should give a transplant to someone who is in and out of hospital all the time and keeps damaging themselves, but just for people like Gary, who made a mistake and never got a second chance."

[SNIP]

Mr Reinbach's family said he had started drinking aged 11 when his parents split up and drank heavily from the age of 13.

He had recently tried to give up and had signed up for support group Alcoholics Anonymous just weeks before he was taken into hospital, they said.

His brother Luke, 18, told the Evening Standard: "They never gave him the chance to show he could change."

Now some of you will probably just shrug your shoulders and say "tough luck, he should've stayed away from alcohol."

And some of you may say, "Well, sometimes tough decisions have to be made."

But a few of you will wonder at the arbitrary rules that will deem one person fit for medical care and another as unfit, and who will set those rules.