A national socialist health insurance scheme almost certainly will eventually involve consigning people arbitrarily to death, painfully or otherwise.
We know that most liberal-progressives and even some who call themselves conservatives are untroubled by the pain and suffering of tens of millions of babies liquidated by abortion. The particularly gruesome violence of partial birth abortion involves smashing the skull of a baby in the process of birth and removing its brain tissue.
Liberal-progressives would demand imprisonment for someone who inflicted such horror on a non-human animal. But women and medical practitioners who support abortion regard babies marked for abortion as non-persons who can simply be ignored as something comparable to a wart that is to be removed.
If our society can applaud this cold-hearted cruelty, why should we doubt for a moment that severely ill and the aged will, in the future, routinely be consigned to death by Federal guidelines panels?
Hadley Arkes expands upon the issue on the First Things website.
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