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Another family in the UK is fighting to keep doctors from forcing their sick baby off of life support. From The Mirror story: Charlie Gard supporters are rallying round the family of a seriously ill little boy as his parents face a battle with medics to keep him alive. Tiny Alfie Evans in being treated at Alder Hey Children’s Hospital in Liverpool and suffers from a mystery condition staff are struggling to diagnose. The 14-month-old family are hoping to find pioneering treatment for their little boy abroad. Alfie has been in a coma in the hospital’s intensive care ward since...

the hospital and the British Parliament will make suitably grave remarks about how tragic it is to lose "this beautiful baby" (whom they killed), and how much their hearts go out to "his loving parents" (whom they stripped of their rights, their dignity, and their baby). But the public outcry will die down; Charlie's death will, given the time-distorting elasticity of memory, begin to look like a vindication (rather than condemnation) of the government's decision; and the real issues at the heart of this case – progressivism's crushing of the private family and socialized medicine's absolute rejection of the natural...

A St. Anthony, N.L., mother who claims she was told by a doctor that assisted suicide was an option for her adult daughter says she wants an apology from Labrador-Grenfell Health, in part because the 25-year-old could hear the conversation. Sheila Elson's 25-year-old daughter, Candice Lewis, has several medical conditions, including spina bifida, cerebral palsy and chronic seizure disorder. During a hospital stay in St. Anthony last November, when Lewis was very sick, Elson said a doctor told her that her daughter was dying and that she had the option to end her life...

Fellow FREEPers, I am NOT trying to be morbid or tactless, but given the recent development with Senator McCain, I want to RESPECTFULLY ask the question. We recall how, on national TV, Obama told a woman whose mother had a terminal condition that might be treated she would probably get a painkiller: http://hotair.com/archives/2009/07/21/video-let-them-eat-painkillers/ So, with this fresh sad case in mind, does any enterprising REAL NEWS people to find out how OBAMACARE treats someone with Senator McCain's sickness.

I woke up very early this morning with the tortured picture of an infant running through my mind. Charlie Gard has a tube through his nose into his lungs, connected to a machine that breathes for him. He has all the latest electronics monitoring his status. But he is unable to provide any indication of his pleasure or pain at the process. He is dying from a horrendous genetic disease that robs his body of the ability to move, breathe, or respond. Next I saw his parents. Their expression conveyed the pain that Charlie cannot. But their pain is not...

Charlie Gard, he’s on life support, in a London hospital. He has a rare genetic disorder. There’s only 16 people in the world that have had this. It prevents his cells from producing enough energy to sustain his organs. At this moment, he can’t move or breathe on his own. The parents have raised $1.6 or 7 million to move Charlie to an American hospital. Why would you move him to an American hospital? Well, because socialized medicine is not as good as the medicine here in the United States. There is a doctor here at Columbia that has dealt...

A European court has ruled that the parents of a critically ill baby cannot privately pay for him to go to the United States for “experimental treatment”, and the child must stay in a British hospital to “die with dignity”. The parents of 10-month-old Charlie Gard are reported to be “utterly distraught” after the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) denied them a final effort to save their dying son. After losing a battle in the UK’s Supreme Court, they had appealed to the court in France to fight the decision of British doctors at Great Ormond Street Children’s Hospital,...

Americans overwhelmingly disapprove of the House plan to repeal and replace Obamacare, according to a new NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll. This new poll comes as Senate Republicans unveil their own health care legislation on Thursday. While the Senate bill shares some similarities to the House version, it also contains differences. ....Just 16 percent of adults believe that House health care bill is a good idea, versus 48 percent who say it's a bad idea.

A bill allowing the starvation and dehydration of dementia and mentally ill patients against their will passed the Oregon Senate 17-13 on June 8. SB494 would remove safeguards in Oregon law that protect the right of patients to receive food and water as part of basic treatment. It would give healthcare representatives power to potentially coerce doctors into starving patients against their will.

Allows natural feeding to be withheld from conscious patients PORTLAND, Ore. (ChurchMilitant.com) - A bill in Oregon's senate is crafted to allow mentally ill patients to be starved to death.Oregon law mandates that healthcare providers give food and water to all conscious patients, who can receive it naturally such as by spoon feeding. SB 494, which is currently in the Senate Judiciary Committee, would remove this mandate for patients suffering from dementia and other mental illnesses.Gayle Atterberry, executive director of Oregon Right to Life, remarked, "Nursing homes and other organizations dedicated to protecting vulnerable patients work hard to make sure...

GPs are being paid millions by the NHS to ration referrals for operations, scans and even cancer tests, an investigation reveals today. Family doctors are being offered the financial incentives in a bid to slash the number of patients they send to hospital for a variety of procedures. The incentives mostly cover non-urgent referrals for hip and knee replacements, cataract surgery, hearing tests and abdomen scans. But two health trusts have included urgent cancer scans in their schemes, and another two covered heart tests. Patient groups said the payments were ‘profoundly wrong’, while one MP likened them to ‘bribes’. Doctors’...

“America wasn’t founded on one homogeneous moral view. We have competing moral views.” Democrat Rep. Gerry Connolly of Virginia spoke these words Monday to the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform as he defended what he sees as the right to kill yourself — and do so in collaboration with a licensed physician working with the imprimatur of the state. The city council of the District of Columbia enacted the law in question in December. It authorizes doctors to prescribe what it politely calls a “covered medication” specifically “for the purpose of ending a person’s life.” In plain English,...

A 70-year-old Dutch woman sipped her coffee and excitedly made plans with her husband and children to spend the afternoon with them and eat a meal together. The woman suffered from Alzheimer’s disease, but was lucid enough to know her family and make plans for the day. What she didn’t know was that she would not be spending the afternoon with them or eating lunch — her family had already made plans with the doctor to end her life. The unidentified Alzheimer’s patient had suffered from the disease for four years and wrote a living will, saying she did not...

Rep. Gus Bilirakis was the next lawmaker to face constituents outraged by the GOP's efforts to repeal the Affordable Care Act. A crowd that local sheriff's deputies estimated at 250 turned up at Bilirakis' town hall Saturday morning in Pasco County, which President Donald Trump won by 21 points. The meeting erupted into shouts and jeers in its first minutes, when Bill Akins -- the chairman of the county Republican Party -- complained of Obamacare's "death panels," a term that does not appear in the text of former President Barack Obama's signature health care law but refers to the Politifact-ruled...

A decades-long trend of rising life expectancy in the U.S. could be ending: It declined last year and it is no better than it was four years ago. In most of the years since World War II, life expectancy in the U.S. has inched up, thanks to medical advances, public health campaigns and better nutrition and education. But last year it slipped, an exceedingly rare event in a year that did not include a major disease outbreak. Other one-year declines occurred in 1993, when the nation was in the throes of the AIDS epidemic, and 1980, the result of an...

....The ACA, also known as Obamacare, provides subsidies to help subscribers afford the cost of individual policies. The law also required all Americans, with a few exceptions, to have insurance. Without the subsidies or the requirement that all Americans have coverage, experts say the healthiest customers would cease buying insurance if they do not have policies through their employers or through the government. As a result, insurers would be forced to increase premiums to cover the cost of treating those sicker patients who remain. Many would find they could no longer afford coverage.

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Barack Obama is urging the public to help save his health care law, which is in serious danger of being repealed under President-elect Donald Trump.In a Facebook Live appearance, Obama says the Affordable Care Act has improved millions of lives over the six years it's been the "law of the land." He says the country can't go "backward."

Residency, in case you haven’t heard, is difficult work. 124,000 of us have dedicated three to seven years of our life to communities around the country, collectively making life and death decisions for millions of patients each day. Our weekly duty hour limit is twice that of most working Americans.... completely repeal Obamacare. Although he has reneged and stated that he would keep the ban on preconditions and coverage for young adults on the table, he has been much less clear about what he’d do to the quality and payment schemes of the ACA. A worrisome contingent of conservatives nonetheless...

...Our premium has tripled to a crushing cost of $1,288 per month, over $15,000 a year. Just this year’s increase alone will be $467 a month, $5,600 a year. Remember, my entire premium was less than $5,000 before Obamacare. And what do we get for the crushing cost? We pay money in order to pay money. The deductible has gone from $5,000 to $13,100, and unlike with our previous plan, nothing but the dubious “annual well visits” are covered prior to meeting the deductible. That means one must shell out roughly $28,000 in a given year before one red cent...

Stephanie Packer wants to be the face of a Right to Live movement — for as long as she draws breath. “I just want to spend every last second with my kids,” Packer, a terminally ill married mother of four kids, ages 7 through 13, tells me. Nearly two years ago, Brittany Maynard, at just 29 years old, became the face of the Right to Die movement now sweeping across the United States. In Oregon, surrounded by loved ones, she took her own life, legally, before a brain tumor could do it for her, with a self-administered overdose of physician-prescribed...