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.
But...
Like a very similar post you made, I will say again- this does not in itself signify the failure of the very idea of socialised medicine; however, what it does signify is what a terrible state our NHS is actually in (or at least in certain localities). Standards of basic patient care (and I emphasise the ‘basic’)- which is what this article is talking about- from what I understand never used to be remotely this bad, and we have had the NHS for about 65 years now.
You are right in saying that no private clinic would be allowed to do this sort of thing- and especially in a counry like the States where it seems people will sue at the drop of a hat- at least in such an arrangement there is more accountabliity. Perhaps with the government’s plans to reform the NHS, which may involve possibly contracting out some services (something the old socialists* over here are up in arms about) might go some way to intoducing that, I don’t know. But a mostly- or fully-private system would probably mean giving up far too much, and there will always be those who will fall through the gaps and won’t even get the promise of care without a. it being an immediate emergency or b. being expected to pay for it directly. I’d rather the mess was cleaned up within the current system, and since we are talking about basic, avoidable things which could have been averted with a reasonable care standard, it shouldn’t be that hard.
Would I recommend you Americans try to copy our system? Possibly not, but its failures are not as inevitable as you might think.
*By which I mean the Old Labour, social-democracy types more than Soviet-style Marxist-Leninist socialism.