A Stitch in Haste

...just kick them out:

A 101-year-old Briton may be kicked out of New Zealand after immigration bosses rejected his plea to spend his final years living with his son, his only living relative.

Despite savings of £145,000 and a £33,000 a year pension, the widower may have to pack his bags after being told his circumstances "do not make him special." A retired research chemist whose son is a university professor, the man, who has not been named, had pleaded to stay in New Zealand after arriving in 2006.
...
But although the unnamed man told the country's Residence Review Board that he ... is hale and hearty, officials have been unmoved by his plight fearing he may be a drain on health resources.

Remind me again how "universal health care" (i.e., switching from having patients, physicians and insurers ration health care to having politicians and bureaucrats do it) represents a new, "enlightened" social awareness?

(And don't forget that this pensioner, a Briton who as a research chemist no doubt paid quite his fair share of taxes over his lifetime), is from another socialized medicine regime that is in fact quietly, and perhaps soon to be not so quietly, killing off the elderly.

Health care, like all scarce goods, must somehow be rationed. Choices have to be made. But they don't have to be made this way. In our quest to feign a new "enlightenment," we are in fact reverting back to a barbarism reminiscent of the ancient Eskimos.

And in the meantime, New Zealand's "enlightened" bureaucrats insist that it's no big deal to require this 101-year old man and his son to live on opposite sides of the world:

"Presumably his son has visited him in that time and there is no evidence as to why his son could not continue to do this in the future."

As if a flight from Auckland to London (26 hours, $2,500) were like a weekend drive across the suburbs.

Madness. Sheer madness.

(Via Socialized Medicine.)