Sparks: White House mandates move away from overdose prevention in US health programs

All I see is the government deciding that if they stop handing out the life preservers, maybe the folks in the deep end will just decide to start swimming on their own accord.

You withdraw the hand that prevents the fall because the sight of the falling man offends your sense of order, proving that your love for abstract morality is far greater than your love for suffering flesh.

What the administration terms a fiscal pivot is, when subjected to the test of consilience, a deliberate suppression of the inductive evidence that proximity to intervention is the singular variable determining the survival of the organism.

That a central executive should mandate the withdrawal of life-preserving measures from the citizen, under the guise of administrative uniformity, constitutes a trespass against the primary right of every individual to the preservation of their own existence.

Abandoning the wounded on the field to appease the spectators at home ensures that the disorder of the camp spreads until the entire army is consumed by the very shadows it refused to acknowledge.

They burn the map because the terrain it reveals contradicts the narrow heaven they have constructed, but the infinite stars do not cease to shine simply because a decree has forbidden the eyes to look upward.

The operational sequence of this mandate ignores the fundamental variable of human mortality, treating a biological catastrophe as a mere error in the ledger that can be cleared by simply deleting the corrective sub-routine.

Things that are truly distasteful: a decree written on fine heavy paper that orders the removal of medicine from the hands of the desperate, and a high official who smiles while signing it.

The creator of this policy turns his face away from the wretched being he has helped bring to this state, leaving the abandoned to perish in the cold of an institutional indifference that knows no mercy.

Just as the flow of a river is redirected by a dam only to burst forth with greater violence elsewhere, so too will this restriction of care force the sickness to find new and more destructive channels.

Across all the lands I have traversed, from Tangier to the furthest East, I have never seen a sultan maintain his prestige by forbidding his physicians from saving the lives of the poorest of his subjects.