By Dave Andrusko

Over and over it's amazing how rubber-of-the-road life experiences meet what we espouse as pro-lifers. It happened, yet again, today.

In Part One of National Right to Life News Today, I've reprinted a fine critique of the "quality of life" ethos by Paul Stark. The insistence that some lives are more "worthy" than others was never merely an abstraction--there have always been such people, especially academicians. But post-passage of ObamaCare it is now a clear and present danger on a massive scale.

Donald Berwick

This was brought home to me this morning as I visited a friend whose body is under siege from an aggressive cancer that has returned with a vengeance.

The cost of treating that cancer and a myriad of associated problems is no doubt very, very high. I don't minimize its importance, but this is only money.

The cost of abandoning him under the guise that the resources could be "better spent" on healthier patients is much higher.

That would represent a withdrawal from a far more important account--what we owe to one another as member of the human family.

If not only ObamaCare itself but the logic that runs through it is allowed to unfold in the manner its aggressive champions such as Dr. Donald Berwick desire, my friend, and countless others just like him, would not be allowed to "drain" resources.

Am I exaggerating?

The Obama Administration used the Sunday talk shows to try to justify its recess appointment of Berwick to head the sprawling Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. (Berwick was sworn into today.) The justifications were so weak, so patently self-serving, it was embarrassing to watch them.

Everybody knows why Obama doesn't want Berwick to testify before the Senate Finance Committee. Berwick is a radical by almost anyone's standard.

If he had to justify his many ultra-controversial statements, it would speak volumes about not only this admirer of the state-controlled British National Health Service (NHS), but also about the man who chose him. In case you missed it, in writing on the occasion of the NHS's 50th anniversary in 1998, Berwick happily confessed, "I am romantic about the NHS. I love it.

All I need to do to rediscover the romance is to look at healthcare in my own country."

Most of us suspect Berwick accurately reflects Obama's true feelings.

Were my friend to have been enrolled in the NHS, he would long since have been dead. That is one reason why people like me have only begun to fight the plague that is ObamaCare.