I find this profoundly disturbing. In spite of all of her medical difficulties she still wanted to live. In spite of her brain not being affected it was ruled by a court that she was 'delusional' and life support was allowed to be withdrawn:
That's what you get when you have socialized medicine. The U.K. (United Kingdom, Britain, England) has the NHS (National Health Service, a government run and funded primary healthcare system). Since the government is paying for it, officials get to decide how scarce resources are allocated, and get to decide when to "pull the plug" when they think resources are being "wasted". another older story: AGAIN! UK judge denies parents' right to take child to Italy for treatment (if you read further down in the comments, it looks like that child was finally euthanized by the government, over the objections of the parents)
I don't think it's related to socialized medicine. It has to do with the definition of futile care. I haven't looked into the details of this situation. I suspect it's a case where the prognosis was basically hopeless longterm, but that doesn't mean you should withdraw life support while the person is still mentally doing fine. This is an ethical issue for doctors in any kind of healthcare setting. And executive staff looking to save money could try to intervene in cases like this to preserve any kind of budget, government or private. The issue there is resources are always finite. How many millions should you spend to keep somebody alive for another month who will die anyway after a poor quality of life when that money could have helped many more. These issues don't go away with for-profit healthcare, they just get decided by profit instead of fairness.
In that story was the doctors gave a prognosis that there was little hope, but they could not really know with complete certainty. The parents held onto hope despite the dismal chances of recovery. Likely the doctors were mainly basing the decision on money, concerns about hospital resource allocation, but tried to use the ethics of "not wanting to pointlessly prolong life and suffering" as an excuse to help justify that decision. But it wasn't truly just an issue of money, since the parents were willing to pay for treatment for their child in another country. The hospital administration seems to have secretly made the decision to euthanize the child, to finally put an end to the controversy. Some people suspect that hospital administrators were afraid of the possibility that if the child was able to make a recovery, it would have been a huge embarrassment to the system and make them look bad, calling into question their decision to withdraw care. So the hospital did not want to take the slim chance that the child might get better.
