Thursday, December 3, 2009

The British solution to health care?

... don't get sick.

So as to alleviate ourselves from accusations of cherry-picking with respect to surmising how our healthcare system will look if we pass Obamacare – let’s broaden the lens a bit. Take Britain, please.

Poor nursing care, filthy wards and lack of leadership at Basildon and Thurrock University NHS Hospitals FoundationTrust led to the deaths of up to 400 patients a year.

Figures compiled by a health watchdog showed death rates at the Essex trust were a third higher than they should have been.

Among the worst failings discovered by the Care Quality Commission were a lack of basic nursing skills, curtains spattered with blood on wards, mould in vital equipment and patients being left in A&E for up to ten hours.


The report by the Care Quality Commission found “systemic failings” in the trusts management of Essex. For those of you in Placentia, California that means the whole doggone system was screwed up and which will produce copious amounts of cherrys.

And here’s the big response to blood, mould and being left to watch A&E:

Katherine Murphy, director of the Patients Association said: “Yet again patients are being neglected. Lack of monitoring, lack of help with feeding, lack of dignity, avoidable pressure sores. How many times do the public need to keep hearing about this before the Government is embarrassed enough to do something about it?


Bless your heart, Ms. Murphy, but the government “doing” has been the problem in the first place.

It speaks to the horrors of statism, though, that the sentence above is as it is and not more along the lines of “How many times do the public need to keep hearing about this before… they vote the bastards outor burn the hospitals down… or run naked around the May Pole…. anything… anything at all that would represent actionable democracy.

Great Britain, our greatest ally in the battle for freedom and liberty is reduced to dependence on a hoped-for shamed government.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Ummm, still cherry picking. Why look:

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/11/us/11hospital.html

A hospital in the nation with 'the best health care in the world' with systemic management problems; we must go to nationalized health care now! At least you are on to bigger cherries; but again a real argument would be based on sweeping national assessments of health, longevity, access, cost, etc.

CZ said...

I checked the article which reports on the Martin Luther King Jr.-Harbor Hospital, a "county run facility" which received "$200 million in federal support, half the budget for the hospital..."

Anonymous, while pregnant with my first child and receiving state aid, I was warned by my social worker to try to come up with money for a private doctor and hospital, and to avoid, if at all possible, going through county facilities. This was in a large metropolitan NoCal city. Private care is the best care. We do not need more poorly run government facilities (county, state or federal), please and thank you very much!