Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt is right when he says: “It is a national health service not an international health service.”
The worldwide recession has forced countries around the world to curb public spending — or risk defaulting on their debt.READ MORE
The United Kingdom is the latest to tighten its belt. The National Health Service (NHS) — the centralized public agency that runs Britain’s government healthcare system — is being forced to shave $31 billion from its budget by 2015.
These cuts are leading to a precipitous drop in the quality of care patients receive. The NHS has been living well beyond its means for quite awhile. And now brutal government-enforced cost controls are exacting a heavy human toll.
Thanks to Obamacare, America will soon face the same sort of reckoning.
Hospital doctors who quit their jobs are being routinely forced to sign "gagging orders" despite legislation designed to protect NHS whistleblowers, it is revealed today.WAKE UP AMERICA!!! THIS IS OUR FUTURE UNLESS YOU JOIN THE REPUBLICANS WHO ARE TRYING TO REPEAL OBAMACARE! SIGN THIS PETITION NOW
Millions of pounds of taxpayers' money are being spent on contracts that deter doctors from speaking out about incompetence and mistakes in patient care.
"Plans to cut hundreds of thousands of pounds from budgets for the terminally ill, with dying cancer patients to be told to manage their own symptoms if their condition worsens at evenings or weekends." Never has "take two aspirin and call me in the morning" sounded more callous.Dems' Health Care Plans Mean Lower Quality, Long Waits
Nursing homes for the elderly would be closed, the number of hospital beds for the mentally ill reduced and general practitioners would be discouraged from sending patients to hospitals. Accident and emergency department services would also be cut.
Thousands of jobs would be lost at NHS hospitals, reports the Telegraph, "including 500 staff to go at a trust where cancer patients recently suffered delays in diagnosis and treatment because of staff shortages." Katherine Murphy of the Patients Association called the cuts "astonishingly brutal."
She expressed particular concern at attempts to ration (that word again) hip and knee operations. "These are not unusual procedures," she said. "This is a really blatant attempt to save money by leaving people in pain."
What do politicians care about that? In Britain, as in America, top officials (including Berwick, who has lifetime health coverage given to him by the Institute for Health Care Improvement) will always have access to the best care, even while they decide the rest of us cannot.
This paragraph in the Telegraph story should send chills down the spine of every American: "Doctors across the country have already been told that their patients can have the operations only if they are given 'prior approval' by the Primary Care Trust, with each authorization made on a 'case by case' basis."
When cost, rather than the value of life, becomes supreme, rationing will inevitably lead to other cost-cutting policies. And yes, despite protestations from those who favored Obamacare that "death panels" would not be part of the equation, you can count on them.
So we come to ObamaCare, the program that, so we're told, will see him carried about in a solid gold sedan chair for the rest of his life by an eternally grateful populace. The sneak appointment of David Berwick to run the thing makes transparent a fact that was brought up continually and just as continually dismissed during the health care debate: that Obama wants a duplicate of the U.K. National Health Service, the sole British feature that he admires.Obama's Failing Presidency
And that's an interesting development. Because, according to studies by British health care specialists, the NHS kills up to 95,000 patients a year through incompetence, mistakes, and accidents. This number is ten times the international per capita average. It is the highest in Europe, and twice that of the U.S., a nation with six times the population.
Since the NHS was established in 1948, hospital beds have dropped from over 800,000 to 160,000, while the number of bureaucrats has expanded to nine for each patient. Tales of patient abuse are a never-ending, almost a daily occurrence. A week ago, the Daily Mail featured a story about a young woman who entered an NHS hospital with excruciating head pain. Assuring her that it was merely a headache, the staff dumped her in a ward. It was actually a rare brain infection. When she began screaming uncontrollably as her brain was crushed against the inside of her skull, the staff tied her to a bed and left her. The next time they checked, she was dead.
Then we have the Liverpool Care Pathway or LCP, a method of end-of-life treatment in which any given doctor decides whether a person is dying or not, and then orders all food and water withheld -- the Terri Schiavo treatment -- along with heavy sedation. Hundreds have died from mistaken LCP diagnoses, including people suffering from such terminal ailments as broken legs, gastritis, and skin infections. I seem to recall a certain lady mentioning "death panels" at some point or other.
Just last week, the NHS ran into a "cash flow" problem (a neat trick with a budget of nearly $100 billion a year). The "trusts" which control hospital operations ran out of funds, leaving the hospitals high and dry. Patients were abandoned on operating tables for hours. Others scheduled for procedures were sent home. Ward patients were denied necessary drugs and painkillers. (The same thing happened in New South Wales in 2008, almost driving the state's health care system -- also based on the NHS -- to collapse. This episode was kept very quiet...so quiet that no single reference to it was made in the American media.)
That's what's coming to us with ObamaCare. Oh yeah -- the number of accidental deaths under such circumstances will rise to the vicinity of 450,000. This won't simply increase Obama's popularity -- it will raise him to the level of legend. The problem is that the legend will comprise equal parts Bernard Madoff, Charles Manson, and Ludwig, Mad King of Bavaria.
With luck, Obama's halcyon days will end this November 2...
Rather than controlling costs, as is promised by American supporters of a "one-plan, one nation" single payer system, the British have created a bureaucratic monster...The costs have grown so rapidly that massive layoffs of health care workers are likely, and elimination of some surgical procedures, such as tonsillectomies, are under consideration...Read the whole thing
Alias Barack Obama: a lie is born: The greatest identity fraud in history Paperback – July 10, 2012
