The couple told reporters that they are just trying to help their child.
Universal healthcare in the United Kingdom did not have the answers, and in fact gave the opposite answer of what healthcare professionals around the world are saying. The couple in question was seeking to eventually have their child seen in the Czech Republic or the United States (for superior health services). They fled to Spain in the hopes of selling property so they could come up with the money to save their child with a cancer therapy they could not get, and would not be given, in their homeland of Great Britain. For their plight, and for daring to take their child away from the authoritarian healthcare systems that plague Europe, they have been arrested, and detained, in a foreign country.
The child's grandmother told reporters it was an "absolute disgrace" that her son and daughter-in-law were accused of child neglect because they removed the child from a healthcare system that was not helping the brain tumor patient.
"They (the authorities) are the ones who are cruel because they have taken poor little Ashya who is dying of a brain tumor and they won't let the parents, my son and daughter-in-law, they won't let them see him at all. It's terrible. It is so cruel it is unbelievable."
The family has criticized Britain's health care system, saying he has a serious tumor that needs an advanced treatment option called proton beam therapy and that it wasn't being made available to him.
"They looked at me, straight in the face, and said with his kind of cancer, which is called a medulloblastoma, it would have no benefit whatsoever," he said as he cradled his sick child on his lap. "Well, I went straight back to my room and looked it up, and the American sites and French sites and Swiss sites where they have proton beam, said the opposite, that it would be very beneficial for him."
In Britain, proton beam therapy is currently only available to treat certain patients with cancer in their eyes. Other countries, including the U.S., Switzerland and Japan, also use proton beam therapy to treat cancers of the spinal cord, brain, prostate, lung and those that affect children.
Britain's health department announced in 2011 it will build two treatment centers to make proton beam therapy available in London and Manchester from 2018. Until those facilities open, Britain will pay for patients eligible for the therapy to go to the U.S. and Switzerland for treatment.
The eligibility is based on the healthcare system's overseers, and if they feel the person should be allowed to be granted the opportunity to possibly save their lives.
Life and death, in a government controlled healthcare system, is relegated to the decisions of panels, of people who have only paperwork to refer to in their decision of your fate, and often panels populated by people who don't have the slightest care about your health because in the end it comes down to money, and whether they are willing to pay dollars for what they consider to be a dime's worth in return.
-- Political Pistachio Conservative News and Commentary
PARENTS OF ILL UK BOY FIGHT EXTRADITION FROM SPAIN - Associated Press
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