You haven’t eaten yet, have you? Good.
Just some headlines:
Mum who lost baby hits out at NHS staff shortages after two more newborns die at same hospital
One in 16 patients in NHS hospitals picks up infection, warns watchdog
Labour considers raising national insurance to fix £30bn NHS ‘black hole’
NHS faces strike threat as 500,000 healthcare staff to be balloted
All of which demands this be asked:
Who would now dare put their trust in the NHS?
Well, one person:
These scandalous headlines come from the liberal and conservative press. They highlight some of the whopping lies Obama has spewed (bending the “cost curve”; universal coverage); they betray the folly of government-run health care being about health care rather than about government.
But the boob-job lady who wants to terminate her baby so that she can appear on Big Brother is the face of Socialized Medicine. She takes no responsibility for her actions—she’s a wholly owned subsidiary of the NHS. She takes silicon implants and returns an aborted fetus. And it’s all free, free, free! (If you call now, we’ll abort your twins for no extra cost!) She’s a monstrous extension of Sandra Fluke, who (as a 30-year-old, remember) wanted a Jesuit institution to cover birth control and abortifacients. It’s one thing to want that—it’s quite another to testify at a fake hearing to demand it.
All of these crushingly depressing headlines are as much a feature of socialized medicine as bed sores and MRSA epidemics.
In case you think I’m being unfair to Britain:
Sweden’s problem is access to care. According to the Euro Health Consumer Index 2013, Swedish patients suffer from inordinately long wait times to get an appointment with a doctor, specialist treatment or even emergency care. Wait times are Europe’s longest, and Swedes dependent on the public-health system have to wait months or even years for certain procedures, or are denied treatment.
For example, Sweden’s National Board of Health and Welfare reports that as of 2013, the average wait time (from referral to start of treatment) for “intermediary and high risk” prostate cancer is 220 days. In the case of lung cancer, the wait between an appointment with a specialist and a treatment decision is 37 days.
This waiting is what economists call rationing—the delay or even failure to provide care due to government budgetary decisions. So the number of people seeking care far outweighs the capabilities of providers, translating into insurance in name but not in practice. This is likely to be a result of ObamaCare as well.
Look at it this way, maybe we’ll all look as hot as Swedes.
