If His Teleprompterness is going to use ACORN to count us in the census, thereby ensuring a lopsided number of congressional districts, he may as well institute a National Health Care System so as to just eliminate us from the population completely.
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.
“We do apologise to all those people who have suffered from the mistakes that have been made in the Stafford Hospital,” said Prime Minister Gordon Brown, questioned on the matter at his weekly grilling in the House of Commons.
Receptionists with no medical training were left to to assess patients arriving at the hospital’s accident and emergency department, the report found.
Julie Bailey, whose 86-year-old mother Bella died in the hospital in November 2007, said she and other family members slept in a chair at her bedside for eight weeks because they were so concerned about poor care.
“What we saw in those eight weeks will haunt us for the rest of our lives,” said the 47-year-old. “We saw patients drinking out of flower vases they were so thirsty.
“There were patients wandering around the hospital and patients fighting. It was continuous through the night. Patients were screaming out in pain because you just could not get pain relief.
“It was like a Third World country hospital. It was an absolute disgrace.”
When you let the government provide medical care for the lowest common denominator, that is what you’ll get too.
Up to 400 people per year died in one single hospital for the last three years. That is more than one unnecessary death per day.
And there are people demanding this program be started in the US tomorrow!
Since I’m not allowed to think that they’re doing so with malicious intent, I am only left with pure ignorance of the real history of programs such as the one in the UK as their excuse.
And speaking of governmental medical screw-ups, let us come back to our own shores to see how they’ve done it this time….
Free medical screenings for workers at Oak Ridge and other Department of Energy sites have been put on hold while DOE investigates an incident in which personal information could have been compromised and establishes a new protocol for handling such data.
The incident involved a lost disc containing the personal information for thousands of current and former employees at DOE’s Idaho National Laboratory. Local officials emphasized today no information involving Oak Ridge workers had been placed at risk.
However, the DOE-sponsored program that provides free medical screenings and CT scans for former Oak Ridge workers was shut down late last week until further notice.
The Atomic Trades and Labor Council, which coordinates parts of programs, has been notifying workers and canceling this week’s appointments.
Stop and think for a moment: What groups of people would you put on a Top 10 list as folks who you’d really not like to see as open to blackmail?
Hmm, yes, I believe that nuclear scientists and nuclear power plant employees would be on my list!
Yes, I DO have the creds to write on this topic: I’m the son of a doctor, I’m an EMT, and I raised my youngest daughter to be a doctor from age 11 (she’s now age 29 and IS a doctor). My oldest doctor recently worked for several years in hospital management, but is back in nursing now.
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There’s another nightmare scenario that you won’t get a preview of before it happens: doctors and administrators retiring, quitting en masse to find other work, or going offshore to work, etc.
When the sort of conditions mentioned in the article begin to arrive, EVERY doctor eligible to retire will retire. Same with the administrators. This will do two things:
1. It will make for a quantum drop in the overall medical-care experience level, hastening the time where the Staffordshire-type problems become routine.
2. Because it takes years to catch up from a doctor shortage (4 yrs undergrad, 3 yrs med school, 2-5 yrs residency), that ALSO hastens the time when the Staffordshire-type problems become routine.
BTW, the NHS in England raised doctor’s pay over 25% in an attempt to keep more of them around, and it didn’t work, so now almost all medical care previously given or directly supervised by doctors (with the exception of surgery) is being given by technicians, or if you are “lucky”, by a nurse (who was not trained to do that).
The degradation in the quality of medical care won’t be a gradual thing: our present quality will decline rapidly upon implementation of ObamaCare, and we will be in an unrecoverable slump in 5 years from the start of it, say in 2010 or 2011.
You may remember the howls coming from wounded veterans’ families about the quality of care at Walter Reed Army Hospital? Which resulted in generals and colonels getting sacked? When ObamaCare is implemented and fully takes effect, you will WISH you were being given that (pre-cleanup) level of care those vets got for a while at Walter Reed.
The implementation of ObamaCare and it’s vastly lowered medical-care standards will be the single biggest push for us to descend from super-power to second-world status.
I’ll bet on it now with anyone who cares to email me.
That should read: (in the first paragraph) “my oldest DAUGHTER”, not “my oldest Doctor”, sorry, no coffee yet.
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