From the UK Telegraph, a story about government-run health care in the UK.

Excerpt:

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

The death toll was disclosed by the Government amid mounting concern over the dignity of patients on NHS wards.

They will also fuel concerns about care homes, as it was disclosed that eight people starved to death and 21 people died of thirst while in care.

Last night there were warnings that they must prompt action by the NHS and care home regulators to prevent further deaths among patients.

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.

The records, from the Office for National Statistics, follow a series of scandals of care of the elderly, with doctors forced to prescribe patients with drinking water or put them on drips to make sure they do not become severely dehydrated .

This is the problem with socialized medicine. You pay your money up front and then later on the government decides how much treatment you get. They have no reason to be nice to you – you already paid them. They don’t get paid more or less based on the quality of care they give you. You can’t get a refund on taxes paid. And where else can you go? It’s a single payer system.

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