This is the fruit of single-payer, government-run health care:

Forty-three hospital patients starved to death last year and 111 died of thirst while being treated on wards, new figures disclose today.

This is what politicians want to ram down our throats in the United States. But wait, there’s more!

The Office for National Statistics figures also showed that:
* as well as 43 people who starved to death, 287 people were recorded by doctors as being malnourished when they died in hospitals;
* there were 558 cases where doctors recorded that a patient had died in a state of severe dehydration in hospitals;
* 78 hospital and 39 care home patients were killed by bedsores, while a further 650 people who died had their presence noted on their death certificates;
* 21,696 were recorded as suffering from septicemia when they died, a condition which experts say is most often associated with infected wounds.

Consider the headlines if a privately owned hospital/nursing home group had statistics like this. And consider how the media ignores and glosses over the problems with government-run healthcare, while hyping how wonderful this new, wonderful “right” to free healthcare, and as they conflate “access” to goods and services with “free.”

We need to have an adult conversation on health care reform, and to do that we need to get past the American media’s propaganda campaign.

Before Obamacare was rammed down our throats, conservatives acquired videos of liberal after liberal affirming that Obamacare – excuse me, Obamatax – was a stepping stone to a single-payer system like the ones implemented in the UK and Canada.  This is just the latest example of why government-managed healthcare is bad – the guy was in the hospital for a hip-replacement surgery and he died from dehydration.  You might expect the staff to be shocked and ashamed something like that could happen in their hospital.  Instead, while the grieving family

held his lifeless body, they were asked by a nurse whether they had “finished” and could she “bag him up now,” the hearing at Westminster Coroner’s Court was told.

This won’t hurt a bit!

But no, we shouldn’t worry about death panels or any problems whatsoever with Obamatax. It’s going to be GREAT.  Just you wait and see.  Liberals excuse this sort of thing every time it’s brought up. “Oh,” they exclaim, “that’s just one example out of X number of thousand treated, most people receive fantastic care. And it’s free!”  Well, it’s free, except for the massive taxes they pay to support the system.  If a privately owned clinic did this to a patient, we’d see liberals wailing and gnashing their teeth about how for-profit healthcare killed a patient.

Independence Day is Wednesday (the name of the holiday is NOT “July 4th” or “Fourth of  July”) and the thought that’s been going through my head all week is that the country we’re handing down to my 22 year old daughter’s generation is substantially less free and less wealthy than the one I came into as a young voter.

Thanks to ECM, here’s the Healthcare Flowchart For Dummies:

Remember that all this mess started with post-WWII wage controls – employers could not legally raise wages to meet demand, so they started adding benefits as a way to attract workers.  The real costs of health care were masked from the worker, and that led to the government-instigated train wreck we’re experiencing today.

We have the right, via abortion, to end the life of our pre-born children. Much is made about the supposed “right to die” in the circumstances of our own choosing. Dr. Kevorkian was a hero to a lot of people for helping them end their lives, yet his acts were crimes.  Attempted suicide will generally get you a stay in your local mental hospital – against your will.  In NY, a motorcyclist was part of a protest against helmet laws – a nanny-state regulation that we shall protect ourselves whether we will or no. He promptly died in an accident which, had he worn a helmet, he would easily have survived.

The question is not whether helmets are efficacious. The question is whether we have the right to indulge in risky behavior, or whether the state has the right to restrict us in order to preserve our lives.

Helmets and seatbelts today – a requirement to lose weight and exercise later? Questions that seemed ridiculous before Obamacare and a legal decision that a lack of activity – the refusal to buy health insurance – constitutes activity are now on the table.  Questions about whether there are any actual barriers to what Congress can require of us are currently being debated.  Helmets are the least of our worries.  Our very independence is at stake.