Category Archives: News

NHS employees leapfrog their own waiting lists to access private health care

Story from the UK Times. (H/T The American Thinker via ECM)

Excerpt:

The National Health Service has spent £1.5m paying for hundreds of its staff to have private health treatment so they can leapfrog their own waiting lists.
More than 3,000 staff, including doctors and nurses, have gone private at the taxpayers’ expense in the past three years because the queues at the clinics and hospitals where they work are too long.

Figures released under the Freedom of Information act show that NHS administrative staff, paramedics and ambulance drivers have also been given free private healthcare. This has covered physiotherapy, osteopathy, psychiatric care and counselling – all widely available on the NHS.

[…]The health department defended the practice and said sending doctors, nurses and other key staff for private treatment helped to get them back to work.

This is actually standard for socialized medicine. In Canada, leftists fly to the United States for health care. They know they’ve wrecked the Canadian system. It’s like Barack Obama and public school teachers sending their own children to private schools. It’s just hypocrisy.

Canadian Human Rights Commissions continue war on Christians

Story from Life Site News.

Excerpt:

The Alberta Human Rights Commission has accepted a complaint brought against an Edmonton-area Catholic school board by a substitute teacher who was let go after she announced she was ‘becoming’ a man.

Janet Buterman, 39, had been employed by the Greater St. Albert Catholic School Board for about four months when, in June 2008, she informed deputy superintendent Steve Bayus that she was undergoing a ‘sex change’ and now wished to be treated as a man.

[…]Buterman maintains that she has a legitimate medical condition – gender identity disorder – and that the board has discriminated against her because of it.

[…]In Buterman’s opinion, the Catholic board does not have the right to let their beliefs enter decisions about employment.  “It appears to me they think they have a right to make employment decisions based on claims, tenets of faith,” she told the Edmonton Journal. “From my perspective, as a public employer, they do not.”

Buterman filed the complaint on October 1st, and the Alberta Human Rights and Citizenship Commission has accepted it on the grounds of medical disability, physical disability, and gender.

and one more:

The Alberta Catholic school board is not the only one coming under fire for upholding its Catholic faith.  An Ontario board was the subject of a human rights complaint last month because of its decision not to hire a non-Catholic.  In that case, the school board is asserting its right to hire teachers that espouse the Catholic values they are aiming to instil in their students.

Similar to what Obama is doing down here to Catholic schools.

Related posts

How Texas cut costs by reforming medical malpractice suits

Here’s some great news from the conservative state of Texas. (H/T Caffeinated Thoughts)

Excerpt:

The Texas Legislature in 2003 adopted sweeping changes to its civil justice system that significantly altered when, where and how many lawsuits could be filed. In the medical malpractice area, those reforms were basically threefold.

[…]First, to sustain a lawsuit against the medical care provider, an expert report was required within 120 days of filing the suit stating that the doctor being sued committed a medical error that caused injuries.

[…]Second, noneconomic damages were capped to control arbitrary awards on pain and suffering or loss of consortium.

[…]The third significant tort reform was to prohibit the introduction into evidence of phantom damages.

[…]These common-sense reforms have led to a massive increase in the accessibility of health care in Texas, huge growth in the capital infrastructure of hospitals and clinics, hundreds of millions of dollars more each year in charity care and Texas’ adding more than 16,000 new doctors in just six years.

And in reducing the actual number of suits to those in which claims are meritorious — a recent Harvard study concluded that up to 85% of all lawsuits brought against medical providers were frivolous — we have created a more equitable system of justice.

I wish I lived in Texas – that’s a real red state, except for stupid Austin. By the way, I got this story out of the round-up at Caffeinated Thoughts. There are couple of great articles in there, like one on the North Korean gulags. It’s worth a look. Shane always links to very interesting articles.