Your government-managed health care update

Do you all remember the outrageous claims of death panels being effectively built-in to ObamaCare? Take a read and tell us if any of this sounds familiar. From The Telegraph:

NHS managers are deliberately delaying operations as they wait for patients either to die or go private in order to save money, according to an official report.

Health service trusts are “imposing pain and inconvenience” by making patients wait longer than necessary, in some cases as long as four months, the study found.

Executives believe the delays mean some people will remove themselves from lists “either by dying or by paying for their own treatment” claims the report, by an independent watchdog that advises the NHS.

The Co-operation and Competition Panel says the tactic is one of a number used by managers that “excessively constrain” patients’ rights to choose where to be operated upon, and damage hospitals’ ability to compete for planned surgery.

It claims unfair practices are “endemic” in some areas of England and pose a “serious risk” to the Government’s drive to open up the health service to competition.

But managers, who are already rationing surgery for cataracts, hips, knees and tonsils, say they must restrict treatment as the NHS is under orders to make £20 billion of efficiency savings by 2015.

Lord Carter of Coles, chairman of the panel, said: “Commissioners have a difficult job in the current financial climate, but patients’ rights are often being restricted without a valid and visible reason.”

Katherine Murphy, chief executive of the Patients Association, said: “It is outrageous that some primary care trusts are imposing minimum waiting times. The suggestion that it could save money because patients will remove themselves from the list by going private or dying is a callous and cynical manipulation of people’s lives and should not be tolerated.”

The article goes on to report that managers have restricted patients' rights to choose among four hospitals, including private hospitals, in order to balance their own books

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(italics, ours)

Call us crazy but it's hard to think that the whole dying thing is what you would call a voluntary feature of the British NHS.

And given the above, you would not be mistaken for holding a sneaking suspicion that Britain's single-payer health care system doesn't seem to have quite as much emphasis on health or care as you might think.

But good to know they have a private system, right? Well, a private system only if you can afford it. So, not only is one paying into the British NHS that covers all Britons, one is also paying out-of-pocket for treatment that NHS managers are denying.

And wasn't this two-tier system of haves and have-nots precisely what government-managed health care like NHS and ObamaCare supposed to eliminate? Wasn't ObamaCare supposed to be all about equal and affordable access for everyone? Yeah, we thought so, also.

Death panels? Nothing to see here - please move along.

Just a preview of things to come, folks.