The State owned all property, including your apartment, the hospital, the grocery store, items supposedly subsidized for the benefit of all. Therefore, if you were unemployed you were a burden to the State. A leech.

Go to the gulag, but not before you go to a mental hospital. Many dissidents were declared mentally ill because anyone who opposed the goodness of the State was by definition mentally unbalanced.

Meanwhile the counter quote to today’s quote came from one of the two discoverers of DNA, James Watson, working in the US on genetic engineering
“People say we are playing God. My answer is: If we don’t play God, who will?”
There is a PBS documentary on him which includes this quote. It gave me chills.

Once you hand over the keys to the kingdom, they will use it

This is from the daughter of a good MD/GP of the old school who didn’t play God but explained the drawbacks of various drugs and surgeries. Too bad those days are over.

Why not the HIV/AIDS patients? Is not their illness “behavior” related?

darkpixel on January 27, 2008 at 11:40 PM

Well, Fidel Castro quarantines HIV/AIDS patients. Maybe we should follow suit since he’s just SOOO wonderful…just ask Michael Moore.

Hmmmm, speaking of Tubbs Moore, wonder what he’ll think about not being eligible for all that socialized healthcare he thinks so much of since he’s obese. Oh wait, he won’t need it since he’s a millionaire.

with most saying the health service cannot afford to provide free care to everyone.

So now no Univeral Healthcare and Substandard Care. Cool.

with most saying the health service cannot afford to provide free care to everyone.

Well, there’s yer golden quote right there!

May the vicious nightmare of socialist healthcare never visit our shores.

“Yes, they might peg out any time, but it’s not our job to play God.”

Unless they are babies in the womb. Then it’s okay to play God.

Speaking in the greater context of the degate, of course. Yes, I know the article isn’t about abortion, but it begs the question and gives me a platform to speak out accordingly.

It was this view that opened the door to all that followed in Germany prior to Hitler. It’s an interesting fact here that the only Supreme Court in the Western World that has ruled against easy abortion is the West German Court. The reason they did it is because they knew, and it’s clear history, that this view of human life in the medical profession and the legal profession combined, before Hitler came on the scene, is what opened the way for everything that happened in Hitler’s Germany. And so, the German Supreme Court has voted against easy abortion because they know — they know very well where it leads.

The abortion ruling is a very clear one. The abortion ruling, of course, is also a natural result of this other world view because with this other world view, human life — your individual life — has no intrinsic value. You are a wart upon the face of an absolutely impersonal universe. Your aspirations have no fulfillment in the “what-isness” of what is. Your aspirations damn you. Many of the young people who come to us understand this very well because their aspirations as Humanists have no fulfillment, if indeed the final reality is only material or energy shaped by pure chance.

The universe cannot fulfill anything that you say when you say, “It is beautiful”; “I love”; “It is right”; “It is wrong.” These words are meaningless words against the backdrop of this other world view. So what we find is that the abortion case should not have been a surprise because it boiled up out of, quite naturally, (I would use the word again) mathematically, this other world view. In this case, human life has no distinct value whatsoever, and we find this Supreme Court in one ruling overthrew the abortion laws of all 50 states, and they made this form of killing human life (because that’s what it is) the law. The law declared that this form of killing human life was to be accepted, and for many people, because they had no set ethic, when the Supreme Court said that it was legal, in the intervening years, it has become ethical.

The courts of this country have forced this view and its results on the total population. What we find is that as the courts have done this, without any longer that which the founding fathers comprehended of law (A man like Blackstone, with his Commentaries, understood, and the other lawgivers in this country in the beginning): That there is a law of God which gives foundation. It becomes quite natural then, that they would also cut themselves loose from a strict constructionism concerning the Constitution.

The result is a relativistic value system. A lack of a final meaning to life — that’s first. Why does human life have any value at all, if that is all that reality is? Not only are you going to die individually, but the whole human race is going to die, someday. It may not take the falling of the atom bombs, but someday the world will grow too hot, too cold. That’s what we are told on this other final reality, and someday all you people not only will be individually dead, but the whole conscious life on this world will be dead, and nobody will see the birds fly. And there’s no meaning to life.

As you know, I don’t speak academically, shut off in some scholastic cubicle, as it were. I have lots of young people and older ones come to us from the ends of the earth. And as they come to us, they have gone to the end of this logically and they are not living in a romantic setting. They realize what the situation is. They can’t find any meaning to life. It’s the meaning to the black poetry. It’s the meaning of the black plays. It’s the meaning of all this. It’s the meaning of the words “punk rock.” And I must say, that on the basis of what they are being taught in school, that the final reality is only this material thing, they are not wrong. They’re right! On this other basis there is no meaning to life and not only is there no meaning to life, but there is no value system that is fixed, and we find that the law is based then only on a relativistic basis and that law becomes purely arbitrary.

And at the same time we find the medical profession has radically changed. Dr. Koop, in our seminars for Whatever Happened to the Human Race, often said that (speaking for himself), “When I graduated from medical school, the idea was ‘how can I save this life?’ But for a great number of the medical students now, it’s not, ‘How can I save this life?’, but ‘Should I save this life?’”

Believe me, it’s everywhere. It isn’t just abortion. It’s infanticide. It’s allowing the babies to starve to death after they are born. If they do not come up to some doctor’s concept of a quality of life worth living. …..

….So what we find then, is that the medical profession has largely changed — not all doctors. I’m sure there are doctors here in the audience who feel very, very differently, who feel indeed that human life is important and you wouldn’t take it, easily, wantonly. But, in general, we must say (and all you have to do is look at the TV programs), all you have to do is hear about the increased talk about allowing the Mongoloid child — the child with Down’s Syndrome — to starve to death if it’s born this way. Increasingly, we find on every side the medical profession has changed its views. The view now is, “Is this life worth saving?”

I look at you… You’re an older congregation than I am usually used to speaking to. You’d better think, because — this — means — you! It does not stop with abortion and infanticide. It stops at the question, “What about the old person? Is he worth hanging on to?” Should we, as they are doing in England in this awful organization, EXIT, teach older people to commit suicide? Should we help them get rid of them because they are an economic burden, a nuisance? I want to tell you, once you begin chipping away the medical profession… The intrinsic value of the human life is founded upon the Judeo-Christian concept that man is unique because he is made in the image of God, and not because he is well, strong, a consumer, a sex object or any other thing. That is where whatever compassion this country has is, and certainly it is far from perfect and has never been perfect. Nor out of the Reformation has there been a Golden Age, but whatever compassion there has ever been, it is rooted in the fact that our culture knows that man is unique, is made in the image of God. Take it away, and I just say gently, the stopper is out of the bathtub for all human life.

Francis Schaeffer, 1983…..25 years ago.

Dr Calland, of the BMA, said: “If a patient of 90 needs a hip operation [colonectomy] they should get one. Yes, they might peg out any time, but it’s not our job to play God.”

RIP G.B.Hinckley

“…according to doctors, with most saying the health service cannot afford to provide free care to everyone.”

That is the real lesson from this article.

It doesn’t take all that much skill to predict the future, especially when the future is now in England and Canada.

I’ve seen it. But I -still- don’t understand the Robot protecting the ice cave after they leave the city.

lorien1973 on January 27, 2008 at 11:10 PM

OT but…..
I read the book a long, long time ago and it’s explained much better. He was a cyborg. Basically a human brain in a robot body and he was the caretaker/maintenance worker for one of the city’s subsystems. When his services were no longer need he and his station were abandoned and forgotten. Over the ensuing years he went insane and spent most of his time carving ice sculptures.

Fertility treatment and “social” abortions are also on the list of procedures that many doctors say should not be funded by the state.

Well, at least we won’t have to worry about that little restriction under Hillarycare!

Say no to socialism.

These doctors are just saying that the government shouldn’t pay for behaviorally-induced illness. If the doctors were referring to gay men who have HIV, some of the commentariat here would (gleefully) agree with them.

But since the doctors are referring to drinkers, smokers and the obese, which describes some of the commentariat here, you dissent.

Amazing how that works, isn’t it?

paul006 on January 28, 2008 at 1:12 AM

Dooowwwn, Skippy. Government healthcare goes waaay beyond social mores. It’s an open door to Big Brothermania!

How will they determine who is leading an unhealthy lifestyle?
Will they have government mandated microchips installed in potential patients to detect the number of adult beverages imbibed?
Will they have cameras in bedrooms to make sure gay men who have HIV are using appropriate protection appropriately?

What exactly is the government definition of “healthy lifestyle”? Will there be government workout centers where your microchip is sensed for a required duration 3 to 5 times a week?

Will there be different tiers of healthcare for the different levels of healthfulness?

Until proponents of government run healthcare can honestly look at the slippery slope that is healthcare rationing and address questions like these they should go back to the drawing board.

Because the the government taxpayers pay for so much already and because of insurance with small or no co-pays, people go waste the time of the doctors for every little sniffle and headache. And because it is the government or some other bureaucracy writing the checks, they have to waste their productive time filling out tons of paperwork.

Other than a few top surgeons and specialists, and a few that have learned to scam the medicare gravy train, I haven’t seen any that are getting “paid more and more for doing less and less”.