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It seems very likely that everything you’re saying is true but thé limited NHS budget wasn’t getting stuck with the bill(thé Italian government and the pope were gonna take care of it). What this actually looks like is petty bureaucrats being thin skinned self important control freaks- again, thé NHS wasn’t being forced to treat them, wasn’t being asked to pay to treat them, was merely being asked not to prevent seeking treatment in a foreign hospital.
Charlie Gard and other related cases had nothing to do with resource allocation.
English law (and this isn't an English weirdness - for example it is the same as the Florida law the courts applied in the Terri Schiavo case) is that once there is a legitimate dispute about whether a patient with no capacity to consent should be treated or not, the courts get to determine the best interests of the patient rather than automatically deferring to the next of kin. I am not a legal historian, but my understanding is that the law ended up in this state in order to stop parents who are Jehovah's Witnesses declining blood transfusions on behalf of their kids - the whole point is the parents' religious beliefs are not imputed to the child, so the Catholic parents' belief that they should prolong life for religious reasons is irrelevant. From a secular perspective, it is not in the child's best interests to keep a moribund child alive in horrible pain in order to attempt treatments with a negligible chance of success.
This isn't a libertarian rule, but it is a perfectly reasonable one. Gard-type cases (resources available to pay for the Hail Mary treatment but the current treating doctors object sufficiently on avoidable-suffering grounds to go to court over it) are rare compared to Jehovah's Witnesses etc, so the rule is life-preserving relative to "go with the parents". And "always try to preserve life" gives the wrong answer in a large fraction of the normal run of cases where resource allocation is an issue.
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