I think we’ve all read about the health care fiascos in Britain and Canada – upheld as the socialist bastions of what the Marxist swine in the United States want to emulate.
Cancer patient forced to pay because she committed the cardinal sin of trying to prolong her life without permission of the nanny state.
A medical “regulator” ruled in Britain that the NHS should not always attempt to save someone’s life if the cost is too much.
A woman dying of cancer was denied free National Health Service treatment in her final months because she had paid privately for a drug to try to prolong her life.
Linda O’Boyle was told that as she had paid for private treatment she was banned from free NHS care.
She is believed to have been the first patient to die after fighting for the right to top up NHS treatment with a privately purchased cancer medicine that the health service refused to provide.
The National Institute for Health and Clinical Guidelines (Nice) has ruled for the first time that saving a life cannot be justified at any cost, in a review of its ethical guidelines.It’s cumbersome and expensive. The Brits spend more money as a percentage of GDP on their substandard and overloaded and overburdened health care than they do on national defense.
The NHS, founded in 1948 to run health care in Britain, employs about 1.25 million people, including part-timers, and spends about £30 billion a year. By international standards, the NHS is efficient: it offers free health care to the population at a cost of 5.8 per cent of GDP. The average among developed countries is 7.6 per cent. However, the system is straining under the steady increase in the number of patients (largely due to the growing number of older people) and relentless increases in the cost of medical treatment as new techniques, drugs and equipment become available.
And yet, they’re unable to provide for their citizens’ health care needs.
Canada is not much better.
Waiting lists are par for the course, and some patients are too sick to tolerate the surgery they needed once their turn finally comes up.
The Fraser Institute, a
<ST1
Vancouver</ST1, B.C.-based think tank, has done yeoman’s work keeping track of <ST1Canada</ST1‘s socialized health-care system. It has just come out with its 13th annual waiting-list survey. It shows that the average time a patient waited between referral from a general practitioner to treatment rose from 16.5 weeks in 2001-02 to 17.7 weeks in 2003. <ST1Saskatchewan</ST1 had the longest average waiting time of nearly 30 weeks, while <ST1Ontario </ST1had the shortest, 14 weeks.
Waiting lists also exist for diagnostic procedures such as computer tomography (CT), magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and ultrasound. Depending on what province and the particular diagnostic procedure, the waiting times can range from two to 24 weeks.
As reported in a December 2003 story by Kerri Houston for the Frontiers of Freedom Institute titled “Access Denied: Canada’s Healthcare System Turns Patients Into Victims” (http://ff.org/centers/ccfsp/pdf/CCSFP-1203-PP.pdf), in some instances, patients die on the waiting list because they become too sick to tolerate a procedure. <ST1Houston</ST1 says that hip-replacement patients often end up non-ambulatory while waiting an average of 20 weeks for the procedure, and that’s after having waited 13 weeks just to see the specialist. The wait to get diagnostic scans followed by the wait for the radiologist to read them just might explain why <ST1Cleveland, Ohio</ST1, has become <ST1Canada</ST1‘s hip-replacement center.
The latest fiasco of Britain’s NHS is the refusal to provide stomach surgery for morbidly obese patients.
I’ll be the first to say, “Take that friggin’ donut out of your mouth, Sparky! The taxpayers shouldn’t be held liable for your inability to control your gaping maw!” And that’s exactly what’s happening here, folks. The citizens are paying billions of dollars annually for “free” health care that, by all rights, should include life-saving procedures like stomach surgery, even if the condition was caused by the patients’ own bad eating habits.
Professor John Baxter said half of all primary care trusts are ignoring NHS guidelines that say morbidly obese patients should have stomach surgery to reduce their appetite.
He believes they strictly limit the procedure because it costs £6,000.
[...]
“The case for obesity surgery is overwhelming. It is clearly being rationed,” he said.
In a free market, the hog would have to either go on a diet, pay out of pocket to lose the weight, or die. Those are choices that every free person makes, and the choices we make come with consequences. Don’t want to stop gorging? Fine. That’s up to you. But don’t expect the taxpayers to be on the hook for your multi-thousand dollar slim-down hospital plan.
In a Marxist nightmare such as the one Obuttcrack, Cankles and Dooce want to impose on us, the taxpayers (or those they’ve appointed or elected to act on their behalf and spend their earnings to make the health care bureaucracy as fiscally responsible as possible – yes, you can laugh now) should have the right to say, “Sorry, fatass. We must judge who is more deserving of surgery – the child with the bad heart or you with your perpetually overworked gullet. We think our money is better spent saving the child.”
I don’t know why the Brits are surprised by this very logical consequence of the “universal” health care they’ve instituted.
Sep 10, 2008 @ 18:14:50
The Brits (with their free medicine) can’t sure misaligned and yellow teeth. Maybe socialized free medicine is not the way to go.
Sep 10, 2008 @ 19:57:19
This is really not new. I predicted more than 30 years ago when all these grand national health schemes were being foisted on the, mostly European, public, that three distinct steps would occur. First, “quality of care”, just how much care could be justified for any particular patient, using their social status as a guide. In other words was it as important to save the leg of someone at great expense if that person were not “important”, when a simple amputation would be less expensive. Second, “quality of life”, should medical care even be provided for persons who in the judgment of some arbitrary panel or functionary would provide the patient with an “acceptable” quality of life. Many people would be denied care under this guidelines.Third, euthanasia. People with medical conditions requiring treatment to sustain life would be terminated despite the wishes if some panel or appointed functionary determined the value to society fell below a certain set parameter.Not being famous, wealthy or connected, of course, I did not reach many people. Those I did reach branded me as a hysterical paranoid and dangerous radical. Now, here we are 30 some years later and all those things have come to pass. Yes, Nicki. All three of those things have come to pass. Not universal yet, but some nations have attained the full monty and others are moving there and have attained step one and/or two. These are western nations, so called civilized nations, not third world.People just don’t like to think, so they don’t. Then they are all surprised when the logical progression reaches it destination.As somebody once told me, ” Yeah, it turns out now you were right, but you weren’t right then when you predicted it. It was too soon.”