Yes - it was made for the patient against the patient's legal guardians - his own mother and father. The government-run system overruled the patient's legal guardians.
This is precisely the issue at hand: a loss of freedom resulting from a healthcare system ultimately ruled by the government itself. The government has final say over healthcare decisions.
Quite frankly I'm much more scared of a system where a parent has complete and absolute control over a child no matter what than one where a court can step in and overrule a decision of a parent. The doctors and courts owe their duty of care to the patient not to the parents.
No, the medical professionals, i.e. doctors do.
"the unanimous opinion of the doctors who have examined him and the scans of his brain is that almost all of his brain has been destroyed".
What happens in a non state run healthcare system when a parent refuses to accept someone's death in the ICU?
The UK doctors punted, agreed. But Italian doctors believed different treatments were warranted. The Italian government gave the boy citizenship.
In a private healthcare system, the parents would be free to pursue that. But in the state-run system of the UK, there was no such freedom. Alfie Evans died last Monday.
Again no.
"The Italian hospital had acknowledged it could not find a cure, but had proposed maintaining Alfie’s life for about two weeks while doctors tried to investigate his condition."
There are no treatments - even that seems to be agreed.
> In a private healthcare system, the parents would be free to pursue that
If they could afford to write a blank cheque for open ended life support. Any insurance would defer to the consensus of medical opinion and cease treatment. They would have ceased cover long before the 2 year trail of court cases and appeals all the way up to rejection from the European Court of Human Rights (not part of the EU or UK govt).
https://www.judiciary.gov.uk/judgments/thomas-evans-v-alder-...
Given this new evidence, I change my opinion on this: the state-run healthcare did offer the best advice.
(The question of state-run medical systems restricting freedom still applies here, even though the freedom would simply have been different end-of-life care.)
Contrast this with the US, where the hospital can announce the plan, and the parents have to sue to stop it happening.
That feels substantially worse.
Especially because in the UK the parents will have legal aid available to pay for their legal representation (Alfie's parents went through seven firms of solicitors) and because the child will have their own independent legal representation.