Why I Think Conservatives Have the Alfie Evans Case All Wrong

Conservatives are railing against dual decisions by the British government to prevent Alfie Evans’ parents from transporting him to Italy for further treatment, and to order Alfie’s doctors to withdrawal life support from Alfie, which they did, and which soon led to Alfie’s death. Conservatives are claiming this is what you get under socialized medicine: heartless government will override parental rights to pull the plug on your children. My thoughts on Alfie’s case are still tentative, but I think that’s a total misreading. The tragic case of Alfie Evans had almost nothing to do with socialized medicine. 


As hostile as libertarians are to government, even we believe government can legitimately order the withdrawal of life support, and prohibit parents from moving a child to obtain further treatment, when that treatment would fruitlessly prolong a child’s suffering — i.e., when further treatment would be akin to torture. In such cases, the government intervenes to protect the child’s rights. (British law frames the decision in terms of the “best interests” of the child, but it seems to me that language clouds the issue and thereby unnecessarily inflames passions.) 


There is no objectively right place to draw the line between cases in which the government should and should not intervene. But I don’t know anyone who thinks it never should. If anyone does make that argument, they’re just wrong. 


There is plenty of room to argue about whether British law and courts drew the line in the right place here. It did not appear Alfie was suffering, but doctors could not completely rule it out. They all agreed that further treatment was futile, though. Is it torture to provide futile treatment to a kid who likely can’t feel pain?


The only way socialized medicine might have something to do with Alfie’s case is that decades of socialized medicine might have shaped the values and attitudes of the elites who make the ultimate decision about where to draw that line. It is not crazy to think that the incentives the British National Health Service creates to provide less care, and the stiff‐​upper‐​lip attitudes that lead Britons to tolerate queues and other forms of explicit and implicit government rationing all for the Greater Good, might influence where the elites draw that line. But if the influence of the NHS leads British elites to be more likely to pull the plug on Alfie, that is not obviously or objectively wrong. 


Nor is it the only way socialized medicine might influence where elites draw the line. The U.S. Medicare program is a system of socialized medicine that imposes no constraints on medical spending or consumption. Decades of experience with it and similar socialized‐​medicine programs have created a pervasive belief among U.S. physicians and policymakers that more medicine is always better. (Spolier alert: it’s not.) So if U.S. conservatives want to make the argument that decades of socialized medicine have made Britain’s elites too willing to pull the plug on Alfie, they must also confront the possibility that decades of socialized medicine have made them too willing to tolerate the torture of children like Alfie.


I don’t know what the right answer was in Alfie’s case. I do know Alfie’s case is not an illustration of the failures of socialized medicine.


I also know that advocates of socialized medicine have exactly zero right to complain about the ignorance of some opponents of socialized medicine, because socialized medicine also socializes the cost of ignorance.


And I know one more thing: there’s a hug and a pint waiting for Alfie’s parents, Tom and Kate, in Washington, D.C.