In September 1999, Jim and Donna Navarro received some of the worst news that parents can hear: their four-year-old son Thomas had a virulent form of brain cancer called medulloblastoma.[1] The following months would subject them to the heart-wrenching pain that only parents of a very sick child can understand. But the Navarros would suffer additional torment from a clash of politics and medicine. Such clashes will become more common in the future as the nation implements its new health care law.

The Navarros were told that Thomas needed brain surgery followed by months of radiation and chemotherapy if he were to have any chance of survival. They quickly agreed and doctors removed a golf ball-sized tumor from the base of his brain.

But the Navarros then learned that the prescribed chemotherapy could damage Thomas's brain and stunt him physically.[2] They decided to research other treatments and learned of an experimental therapy that did not have such side effects-but that also was unproven. Faced with the miserable choice between a painful treatment that, if it worked, could leave Thomas mentally and physically impaired and a treatment with unknown effectiveness, the Navarros decided to try the experimental treatment.

I don't know if I'd make the choice the Navarros did, but I certainly can't say their choice was wrong. Health care is one of the most difficult aspects of human life. It is intensely private. It has many unknowns. We experience both its benefits and costs (financial and physical) in very personal ways. Most important, it affects something very precious: the quality and quantity of human life. Because of all that, our health care choices are-or at least should be-heavily influenced by our personal values since each of us deals differently with risk and the unknown, with tradeoffs of costs and benefits, and each of us has a unique idea of what we want from life. For this reason, difficult medical decisions are often more a matter of values than science.

Unfortunately, the Navarros would learn they didn't have the right to make that choice for their child-or for themselves if they were sick.

Because the therapy they wanted was experimental, federal regulations prohibited Thomas from receiving it unless he was part of a clinical trial. And if he were in a trial, he could unknowingly receive a placebo instead of the treatment. The doctor running the trial was willing to administer the treatment outside the trial, but the law wouldn't allow it. The Navarros tried to fight the government on this, but they were threatened with child endangerment charges and ended up agreeing to chemotherapy. Sadly, the treatment failed and Thomas died in November 2001.[3]

The problem with government involvement in health care is that, the more it intervenes, the more it must stipulate the values that medicine must adhere to. This is not the result of policymaker malevolence, but is simply the nature of health care. In Thomas Navarro's case, government stipulated that an established treatment-despite its imperfection and risk-is always preferable to an unproven treatment. That is a defensible value, but then so is the Navarros' preference for a less risky, though unproven, treatment.

The nation's new health care law makes a host of such values choices, including that people should access the health care system through insurance, that insurance should be provided by employers, and that coverage must include specific services. Each of those choices is defensible, but each is also subject to serious criticism.[4]

Last month, the Obama administration dealt with heartburn from one such values choice: the mandate that insurance cover contraceptives and "day-after" birth control.[5] In essence, the mandate socializes the cost of those drugs: a portion of every person's insurance premium goes to cover the drugs' expense. It's understandable why some people would value this; it's also understandable that some people wouldn't want to share the cost because it violates their religious beliefs. If left to individuals' free choice, people could opt in or out of coverages that socialize the cost among those willing to bear it; now, even after an administration "compromise," government has made that choice for everyone.

Government will make many more values choices under the new health care law. And future shifts in American politics (which are inevitable) will alter those choices periodically. This doesn't suit a highly diverse nation of nearly 315 million people. Yet that's what we've embraced with the new health care law, and with big government generally.

[1] Basic information on the Navarro story is from: Anne-Marie O'Neill, "Saving Thomas Navarro," People 53(11): 54-59; Peter Chowka, "Cancer Patient Thomas Navarro Dies at Age Six," Natural Health Line, January 1, 2002.

[2] Andrew W. Walter et al. "Survival and Neurodevelopmental Outcome of Young Children with Medulloblastoma at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital." Journal of Clinical Oncology 17(12): 3720-3728.

[3] In April 2001, Thomas was given two weeks to live. Federal law does allow terminal patients to try experimental treatments, so he finally was able to receive the unproven therapy. Thomas outlived the two-week prognosis, but he ultimately succumbed. According to his death certificate, one of the contributing factors in his death was "chronic toxicity from chemotherapy." The experimental therapy remains unproven and is still undergoing clinical testing. See Chowka; Joseph Mercola, "Two Words You Should Never Utter to Your Doctor," Mercola.com, September 24, 2011.

[4] For criticism of the first two choices, see: David Goldhill, "How American Health Care Killed My Father," The Atlantic, September 2009.

[5] Caroline May. "Obama Administration Approves No-cost Birth Control, including ‘Morning After' Pill." Daily Caller. August 1, 2011.