An Infuriating Feature of the Healthcare "Debate"

I just read this:

Parents care more about their children than do the members of the bureaucracy. But parents are being gradually curbed in their authority by precisely those bureaucrats across the West.

On Tuesday, a British court condemned a not-yet-2-year-old child to die. Now, make no mistake: The child, Alfie Evans, is expected to die in the near future anyway; he suffers from an undiagnosed brain condition that has robbed him of much of his function. But his parents simply wanted to be able to transfer him from a British hospital to an Italian hospital to seek experimental care.

And the British court system refused.

Citing the expertise of Evans' doctors, the courts declared that Evans' best interests are not served by his parents' attempts to save his life. Instead, the little boy would be deprived of life support, left to die without oxygen or water. The ruling, the judge said, "represents the final chapter in the life of this extraordinary little boy." But that chapter was written by the British bureaucracy, not by his parents -- the ones who will have to engrave his epitaph and visit his grave.

This appalling result isn't the first of its kind; just last year, a little boy named Charlie Gard was taken off life support thanks to the British court system, which presented his parents from sending him to the United States for further treatment. Again, the courts made the argument that the best interest of the child lay in his death.

All of this is the final result of a system of thought that places parental control of children below the expertise of bureaucrats on the scale of priorities.

This argument is, I suppose, valid on its face. However, what it fails to recognize is that we currently have a system that "places parental control of children below the" unquestioned infallibility of the free market, i.e. "If you can pay, you get the treatment. If you can't, your children die."

So, Ben Shapiro (author of the linked article) is making a great case for not letting government bureaucrats control the health outcomes of citizens while utterly ignoring the fact that market forces are controlling such outcomes. Is it better that my 3-year-old die because I can't afford her treatment as opposed to because some government bureaucrat decided that the treatment options available were not worth pursuing? I don't know, but I think that any argument that merely focuses on the injustice of a bureaucrat making decisions for my family without at least acknowledging the alternative is problematic on its face.

For example, what if I argued that here in Indiana, you can only get to places where the government bureaucrats have decided that we should have public roads? Is the logical conclusion of that argument that we should not have public roads? After all, the reason I can't get certain places is because government bureaucrats have determined that the route that I care about isn't important enough to get built (according to the argument, which utterly ignores that any one person can't possibly be expected to finance each and every road upon which he may someday want, or need, to travel).