A collective cry of outrage was heard around the world as once against the socialized single-payer healthcare system of the UK was front and center in the life or death care of a child. Numerous justifications of the neglect and lack of discernible medical care for Alfie have been made.

The simple truth about what happened to Alfie Evans is that it all comes down to one thing: money.

Here’s the easiest way to understand this tragedy. The UK is a country that uses a socialized health care system (also called a single-payer system). This means every citizen is given “free” healthcare. This is the same type of health care system that politicians like Bernie Sanders advocate. The socialized system ensures every citizen has the right to free health care, hospitalization, treatment for illness, and most other basic medical necessities.

This sound good, in theory. It’s not until you realize that politicians and judges have authority and control over the care given to people that it becomes clear that socialized healthcare is a terrible system. Other factors, such as caps on the amount of money medical personnel can make, and government regulations on doctors also contribute to the failure that is a socialized health care system.

Thomas Wheatley recently wrote an article explaining how the single-payer system is responsible for Alfie’s death. He wrote:

“When a nation enacts universal, taxpayer-funded health care, it effectively builds a wall around its health-care system. Within this wall, resources are finite, which effectively creates a zero-sum game where one person’s gain is necessarily another person’s loss (only so much medication may be dispensed; only for so many hours of the day can a doctor spend seeing patients; only so many hospital beds can be vacant). Where in a free market health system a patient has the entire global health industry at his or her disposal and is limited only by individual wealth, in a public system, a patient has access only to resources the government has acquisitioned and made available for use.”

The cards were stacked against Alfie already for no other reason than he lived in a country where the government controls the health-care system rather than the free-market. Whereas the free-market would gladly compete to treat Alfie, the government run system had determined he must die so care could be given to others.

Here’s a fundamental truth of economics: the age of the working population and the percentage of the population currently in the workforce help determine economic growth. A country with a younger workforce and high participation in the workforce will have a higher economic output that equates to a growing economy.

A country with an aging population and lower levels of workforce participation will have a stagnant economy. Guess which one of those camps the UK economy is in? When your economy is stagnant and your population is aging, and your health-care system is government run, do you prioritize the terminally ill toddler or someone else?

Why didn’t the UK medical system and legal system want Alfie to go to Italy to get medical treatment? The answer is easy, but also shocking.

It was determined by British doctors that Alfie would never function as a normal human being. It was determined that he would, at best, be a conscious, aware person in need of constant medical care. He would never be a contributing member of society but, instead, would be a drain on the economy by needing constant medical care (provided by the government through taxes in the single-payer system).

If Alfie went to Italy to get treatment, his life might have been prolonged, but even treatment might not have changed the ultimate outcome of Alfie being little more than a person in need of constant medical care. So if Alfie went to Italy to get this treatment, then came back to the UK, he would simply be a drain on the economy rather than a contributing member.

Like all good socialized things, the bottom line is that the bottom line matters most. It doesn’t matter that this is your child and, like any good parent, you are willing to go to any lengths to see his life prolonged. All that matters is propping up the system by rationing care to those the medical professionals and judges deem most worthy; i.e. those with a better chance of not needing ongoing care.

As Wheatley pointed out in his article, Alfie Evans was just another lamb on the altar of progressivism:

“A toddler destined to die so the government can pay the entire nation’s health bills. It doesn’t matter that Alfie can get treatment elsewhere. It doesn’t matter that Alfie’s parents object. It doesn’t matter that all human decency in the world is screaming in outrage at the barbaric injustice perpetrated by Britain’s single-payer death squads. The sacrificial lamb must be slaughtered in the name of progress.”

The same system that killed Charlie Gard, and now Alfie Evans is being pitched in the United States. It goes by harmless descriptions like “universal health care for all” while being sold by bureaucrats that want to sit in Washington and decide who lives and who dies.

Offering health care as a handout of the government is a sure way to get some to vote for a politician or a policy. But ask yourself, is this the system we want in America? A system that prioritizes money over human life. Are the lives of our elderly, our ill, and our kids less valuable than the working class?

If it was your child, would you support the medical system that has condemned him to death?