Free health care?
The British government apologised Wednesday after a damning official report into a hospital likened by one patient’s relative to “a Third World” health centre. Stafford Hospital in central England was found to have appalling standards of care, putting patients at risk and leading to some dying, according to a report on Tuesday.
Between 400 and 1,200 more people died than would have been expected in a three-year period at the National Health Service (NHS) hospital, according to an investigation by the Healthcare Commission watchdog.
Golly.
I’m sure we’ll do it better.
This can be used to solve the Social Security problem. Kill us off with a National Health Service when we get too old to continue working and pay taxes.
Sorta like “two birds with one stone.”
If you think health care is expensive now, just wait until it’s free.
- P.J. O’Rourke
Yeah, I remind my sister (who voted for the won), I’m glad you’re executor for mom’s estate. When health care is rationed to those deemed most able to benefit from it, she can sit by the bedside and explain to mom why she can no longer have her pills to continue a quality of life. And I rub it in to my Chicago friend who is on SS and voted for the won. How his kidney cancer would have put him on the Do Not Treat list at age 66 so that the younger generation could continue to be productive and pay for the bailout. Cynical me? Nahhhhh.
My British born MD Father-in-Law ably explained to me long after he immigrated to the States to practice medicine in the U.S. after he trained as an MD in his native country about the effects of socialized medicine.
He asked me “do you want to be treated in a system that loses money when you die? or one that saves money when you die?”
Socialized medicine……. The people that complained about how horrible Walter Reed medical care was for our veterans clamor for socialized medicine. Is that a definition of Irony??
I live in Quebec, Canada. Our medical system is just like the Brits, but with problems that are even worse. Ignoring the long wait times for meeting a specialist, a few years ago we had thousands who died from poor sanitary conditions in our hospitals. Yes …. I am saying thousands. The following link describes how 100 died in just one small hospital.
http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/11711.php
For a province with a population base of only 7 million, this was a disaster that affected many of us …. including me. There is now an acceptance that socialized medicine has been a disaster, and private clinics are now being accepted.
This is news that people like Michael Moore and many others who are advocate of socialized medicine tend to ignore.
The U.S. approach will probably mimic’s Canada’s initial approach towards socializing medicine. And like Canada, after about a decade or two you will all realize the mistake that has been done.
For my own personal care, I go to the States and pay out of my pocket.
Whenever I want to make a service cheaper, more easily available, or perhaps of improved quality…
My first thought is to put a bunch of lawyers in charge of it and let them write mission statements and policy briefs.
Because that would do *so* much for the consumers.
As I tell my friends who’ve decided socialized health care is the way, “Join the military and live The Dream. Let me know how that works for ya.”
Did ya notice they were able to predict how many people could be expected to die, statistically, at the hospital and thus discovered the problem when the results did not meet the expectations? Did you also notice the normal excuses for the absolute failure to provide care in the article? Failures to communicate, I believe one of them was.
Workers in the field communicate quite well with each other, often employing “words of power” in a gratuitous manner, most often regarding the higher-ups who sit in offices and look at spreadsheets that tell them to three decimals how many gallons are left in the swamp and at what rate they’re being drained.
The part about being up to your ass in alligators? Sorry, not one of the macros.
More in a bit, I feel a rant coming on…
– Max
Max/
Still checkin’ in daily on old John C. Rays Blog “Socialized medicine”–or does it force you to up the blood pressure meds too much? Don’t you just love his umbrella coverage of latest daily outrages in GB, Canada, NZ and AUS all in one convenient place? For my money is the best one-stop shopping around. (get some overlap
coverage in his blogs “Eye on Britain” and Australian Politics” too…)
I found that until I started monitoring his place consistently I had NO IDEA the true extent of the horror stories. I must confess tho, now I’ve become so damn jaded to the seemingly never-ending line of the latest examples of the idiocies/human tragedies
that these well intentioned (see: Hell; roads, paved.) socialist systems produce that it’s all beginning to be one vast blur by now as I skim over the latest examples–almost can’t stand to click on the site any more. Guess I need some R&R from the culture wars, perhaps some mindless, drunken, cheap sleazy sex– but then I keep remembering I’m married,
and while I can handle the drunken part all right, it sure doesn’t come cheap!
PS–And as my wife would be the first to inform you, I’ve got the “mindless” part down pat.
Max,
Or be enrolled in the VA health care system.
Pelosi & Reid are on record as having said they’d like to model a national health care system on the VA.
To anyone even remotely considering that, I would advise them to first spend some time in a VA facility, under VA rules, with the redundant layers of administration and reams of paperwork, screenings, referrals, etc.
They might well have a change of mind.
As my English employees used to tell me-
the cure is worse than the disease.
2004 – 100 deaths in an 18 month period. Not a good thing. Except I don’t think most people would immediately link death from superbugs with third world hospital conditions. I spent over six months at my mother’s bedside in hospital last year and although I’ve certainly had concerns in the past, I saw nothing to cause me to question her quality of care then.
But here’s some irony for you, Victor, although “more than 90,000 Americans get potentially deadly infections each year from a drug-resistant staph “superbug,” (that’s 2007 BTW),never fear, help may be on the way from thanks to the Brits and the Canucks.
Did I cherry pick those stories? Damn right, just like I think others might.
Sorry, the link to the Brits should have went here.
I have a cyber-friend and fellow hip dysplasia sufferer (though I guess you could say I am a former sufferer as those affected body parts are no longer in existence…but I digress).
My cyber-friend is facing a hip replacement in the next 2-3 months. Of course she’s been wandering thru their archaic “see multiple specialists who all tell you the same thing” process for over a year now.
Anyway, she e-mailed me last night that she was going to have her surgery in the hospital mentioned above. She has jumped ship to someplace else.
Nice choice to have to make in the midst of preparing for major surgery.
Many British doctors in my husband’s field come here for more advanced training. My husband is one of their instructors. We’re continually appalled at the stories we hear and the state of any type of medicine over there.
These doctors get their advanced training, and then leave the NHS to go into practice for those who have private insurance or who can pay cash. Needless to say, the care they provide far exceeds what the average person in Britain could ever expect or dream of receiving.
I’ve probably said this here before… I took a trip to Scotland a few years ago and the NHS was something you definately did not want to discuss over dinner. I was with middle class people and they were so soundly against the state of their health care that all eatting stopped and an extreme conversation ensued regarding the failed health plan in the U.K.
I understand that Michelle will defend the Canadian system to her last breath. I also know that regular people feel trapped in the U.K. and are so anxious about their health care that they can hardly contain themselves.
One person told me that after waiting months for his 15 minutes in front of the Dr. that he became tongue tied and actually couldn’t talk to the person.
I understand that Michelle is a young person with young children. That is the best case scenario for socialised health care. We were insured for a short while by Kaiser. With two young children it was a joy to go into the clinic and have the children diagnosed with an ear infection, have tests performormed and walk out with the antibiotic.
An elderly woman I knew had her husband suffer a heart attack while under Kaiser’s care. She told me the bad news was that Kaiser would not cover a lot of his treatments. The good news was that he sufferred the heart attack outside of their treatment range…
Sadly the rationing of health care has already started in this country. I was talking with my mother (who is 83) about a friend of hers the same age that lost her doctor to retirement. She was unable to find another Doctor to take her as a patient due to the the various medical groups self-imposed limits on the percentage of medicare patients they could accept due to onerous paperwork and limited compensation for services rendered. She had a cardiac problem and after admission to UVA hospital for surgery had to enlist the Doctors there to insist that a group take her in for post operative care. But they would only deal with her cardiac issues and not any other issues. While not wealthy she is solidly middle class and has “played by the rules” her entire life.
I suspect her case is not an isolated one and is a harbinger of things to come.
Not a lot to look forward to growing old it seems.
Gee, Babs, looks like you got me pegged. Except for one tiny thing. Unfortunately for me, I’m not that young; actually I suspect that I am fairly close (although probably a little bit younger) to your age. With two teenage kids… ack!
Although I won’t instigate a fight, I will defend our system (it’s far from perfect, but I will defend it) to the death, but the British system be a different story. I really don’t understand how the NHS works except from what I’ve read online and I have one friend who lives there. And frankly, it sounds like it sucks. Sorry if that sounds hypocritical, like I say my knowledge of their system is far from first-hand but I don’t think I’ve ever heard anybody even try to defend it!
Before ‘they’ come for me to kill me [I'm going to be 81 in June] I think I should remind you folks that back in the early years of the Clinton administration, we, the voters, voted down the Hillarycare plan. Obama’s “universal” health care plan is the evil child of Hillarycare, with some extra flourishes and even more toxic additions. I suspect we’ll have to drive a silver stake through its heart this time, the way they used to do with vampires.
As the old song says, “It’s dead, but it won’t lie down.”
Marianne