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NHS horror story: neglected patient calls police for water, dies of thirst

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I spotted this UK Daily Mail story on my FB feed from bioethicist Wesley J. Smith.

Excerpt:

A young patient who died of dehydration at a leading teaching hospital phoned police from his bed because he was so thirsty, an inquest heard yesterday.

Officers arrived at Kane Gorny’s bedside, but were told by nurses that he was in a confused state and were sent away.

The keen footballer and runner, 22, died of dehydration a few hours later.

A coroner had such grave concerns about the case that she referred it to police.

Yesterday an inquest was told how Mr Gorny died after blunders and neglect by ‘lazy and careless’ medical staff at St George’s Hospital in Tooting, South London.

His mother Rita Cronin, a civil servant told Westminster Coroner’s Court that staff tutted at her and repeatedly refused to listen to her concerns that her son hadn’t been given vital medication.

At one point he became so desperate and upset that staff sedated and restrained him – and on the night before his death, his mother said, he was not checked on by medical staff, despite being in a room on his own.

[…]When he arrived at hospital for the hip operation, nurses assured the family they would give him his medication and said: ‘Don’t worry, he’s in good hands – we’ll look after him.’

But, despite the repeated reminders and insistence by both Mr Gorny and his family, staff failed to give him the tablets and he became severely dehydrated after being refused water.

In an interview with the Daily Mail in 2010, Miss Cronin said of the nurses who treated him: ‘They were lazy, careless and hadn’t bothered to check his charts and see his medication was essential. He was totally dependent on the nurses to help him and they totally betrayed him.’

Yesterday Miss Cronin told the inquest she received a distressed phone call from her son on May 27, 2009, in which he told her he’d called the police because he was so desperate for a drink.

[…]She then went to the hospital where she found him ‘confused and angry’, shouting at staff and behaving in an uncharacteristically abusive manner.

Despite this, one doctor asked if he was ‘coming off the booze’ and another asked if he was ‘always like this’. Miss Cronin said: ‘He sounded really, really distressed. He said “They won’t give me anything to drink”. ‘He also said “I’ve called the police. You better get here quickly: they’re all standing around the bed getting their stories straight”.’

When Miss Cronin arrived, she recalled: ‘They weren’t doing anything. They seemed out of their depth. It felt like the two locum doctors were nervous about calling anyone more senior than them.’

The inquest heard Mr Gorny was restrained by security guards and sedated with strong medication to calm him down. Later, he was put into a side room and left alone.

Miss Cronin said she sat in his room for three hours the night before he died without a single nurse checking on him or giving him vital medicine.

Dr. Smith also linked to this article where doctors have to prescribe water to patients in order to ensure that they do not die of dehydration in the NHS. This is what you get in a secular socialist system of health care where you pay through your working life and then when you ask for health care, you get in line, because they spent your money buying votes from people with “free” breast implants, sex changes, abortions, contraceptives and IVF.  Is that health care?

The benefit of the free enterprise system with respect to health care is that you keep your money in your pocket and you pay for quality health care at the best price. No one complains about Amazon.com, they only complain about the Department of Motor Vehicles. There is a reason for that. Amazon has to compete for your business, but government monopolies don’t. You have no choice when it comes to government monopolies. They don’t care. They get paid anyway.

Commentary

Student debt forcing college graduates to put their plans on hold

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First, from Yahoo News, some anecdotes to help everyone understand what faces young people trying to get an education and find a job. (H/T Captain Capitalism)

Excerpt:

We asked Yahoo News readers to tell us their experiences with student loan debt. Over 600 graduates (and not-quite graduates) of all ages emailed to share their stories. We’ll be sharing more of their stories in the next week over at our Tumblr.

Overwhelmingly, Yahoo News readers told us they felt burdened by their debt. “We do not like debt,” wrote Katelyn Fagan, who graduated from Brigham Young University in 2011. She and her husband have a combined student loan debt of just under $70,000. Fagan tried to work while in college, but wanted to focus on her academics. “Maybe I could have sought out other employment options (and I sometimes did) but school was my top priority.”

“Student loans have basically ruined my life,” says Tanya Carter, who graduated from the University of Toledo in 2008. She went to community college for two years before transferring, and attended classes part-time so she could also work. When Carter maxed out on federal loans, she turned to private loans to finish her degree. As a result of all that debt, she writes: “I never see myself owning a home, vehicle, or maybe not even getting married.”

The need to delay starting a family because of financial worries was a common concern. Lauren Dollard graduated from Fordham University in 2008 with $157,000 in debt, including interest. “My boyfriend won’t marry me because of my debt,” she says. “He doesn’t want it attached to his name (I know, this could also be an excuse).” She said she would trade her “fancy private school education” in a heartbeat to live “as an independent adult.”

April Flores graduated from San Diego State in 2008 with $80,000 in private loans and $30,000 in subsidized loans. “It is going to be hard to buy a house and start a family with our debt,” she writes. “We joke and say that our baby is Sallie Mae, but it is true! Education is invaluable, but I was not wise in my early 20s and did not make the right decisions when it came to my private loans.”

Flores was far from alone in bemoaning her failure to understand the implications of those promissory notes. Salvatore Aiello graduated from the University of South Carolina in 2009 with $68,000 in debt. “I blame ignorance in my pursuit of loans; my high school did a terrible job explaining our options when it came to financial aid,” he told us. “They made it seem that if I wasn’t rich or beyond poverty I would not have been able to go to college.” Aiello followed up with a second email—he and his girlfriend are now expecting their first child. They are, in his words, “very excited at the unexpected blessing but terrified.”

Here’s an article from the New York Times in which a professor explains what causes tuition rates to rise: (H/T Cato Institute)

ACADEMIC economists like to make fun of businesspeople: they want competition when they enter a new market but are quick to lobby for subsidies and barriers to competitors once they get in. Yet scholars like me are no better. We work in the least competitive and most subsidized industry of all: higher education.

We criticize predatory loans by mortgage brokers, when student loans can be just as abusive. To avoid the next credit bubble and debt crisis, we need to eliminate government subsidies and link tuition financing to the incomes of college graduates.

Nearly eight million students received Pell grants in 2010, costing $28 billion. In addition, the federal direct loan program, which allows nonaffluent students to get government-guaranteed loans at low interest rates, cost taxpayers $13 billion in 2010-11. Total subsidies to university education amount to $43 billion a year, including around $2 billion in Congressional earmarks — and that does not even include tax subsidies (for college funds); tax breaks (for university endowments, for example); and subsidies dedicated to research.

Just as subsidies for homeownership have increased the price of houses, so have education subsidies contributed to the soaring price of college. Between 1977 and 2009 the real average cost of university tuition more than doubled.

These subsidies also distort the credit market. Since the government guarantees student loans, lenders have no incentive to lend wisely. All the burden of making the right decision falls on the borrowers. Unfortunately, 18-year-olds aren’t particularly good at judging the profitability of an investment without expert advice, and when they do get such advice, it generally counsels taking the largest possible loan. The stock of student loans has reached $1 trillion, while the percentage of borrowers in default jumped to 8.8 percent in 2009 from 6.7 percent in 2007.

Last but not least, these subsidized loans keep afloat colleges that do not add much value for their students, preventing people from accumulating useful skills.

That article also contains the solution:

Investors could finance students’ education with equity rather than debt. In exchange for their capital, the investors would receive a fraction of a student’s future income — or, even better, a fraction of the increase in her income that derives from college attendance. (This increase can be easily calculated as the difference between the actual income and the average income of high school graduates in the same area.)

The solution is to privatize the entire student loan system, and make the loans conditional on future earnings. That way, universities will be chosen based on their ability to provide jobs to students, and students will have to justify to banks (who represent ordinary people who put money on deposit with an expectation of a return!) why they should get a loan and how they expect to pay it back.

But what has Obama actually done?

Let’s see:

The president, by way of administrative fiat, plans to continue redefining the federal student-loan industry, making taxpayers absorb the financial risks of federal direct lending and leading the country over a cliff into future funding shortfalls. On Wednesday, the president announced his executive order to reduce monthly student-loan payments, consolidate loans into direct loans, and offer loan forgiveness after 20 years, all in the name of college access.

President Obama’s executive action would cap monthly repayment at 10 percent of discretionary income and offer students an incentive for consolidating Federal Family Education Loans (FFEL) and direct loans into the direct-loan program, which administers loans directly to students, instead of having them issued by banks. Students will be given a 0.5 percent interest-rate reduction for switching to the direct-loan program.

But why the urgency to employ executive action to shift to the direct-loan program now? The federal government is currently lending to students at an interest rate of 6.8 percent while it is borrowing at less than 1 percent, and the difference is kept by the federal government and spent on other programs, like converting the popular Pell Grant program into an entitlement. The president is lobbying for more students to move to direct loans so that the government can spend the money elsewhere. As Rep. John Kline, chairman of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, said, “It’s a pretty big slush fund.” Under the Healthcare and Education Reconciliation Act, all new federal student loans are now direct loans, but there are still $400 billion outstanding loans that are not.

But these “savings” are misleading, as future shortfalls are inevitable. These loans are riddled with risk. When pressed by a reporter about why students would want to pay back the loan if they will be forgiven anyway, Secretary Duncan simply said that “people want to do the right thing.” However, student-loan default rates have been increasing for nearly ten years and are now at 8.8 percent. On top of these high defaults, the jobless rate for Americans with at least a bachelor’s degree is now 5.1 percent, the highest since 1970.

As former CBO director Doug Holtz-Eakin wrote, “The Secretary of Education is now one of the top financial executives in the U.S., and Congress spent nearly all of the over-estimated ‘savings’ on the President’s health care reform and unaffordable education entitlements and will add more than a trillion dollars of risky loans to the national balance sheet by 2017.”

Just like the housing bubble, the Democrats have again made it easier for a certain segment of the population whose votes they wanted to borrow money – money that they now don’t have to pay back. Being a leftist means taking money away from people who earned it and giving it to others (students, universities) who don’t have to pay it back.

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Commentary

A simple introduction to Obamacare

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Here’s a helpful article from the UK Daily Mail that Dina sent me that explains the basics for people who are wondering what all the fuss is about. The author Diana Furchtgott-Roth has a B.A. and M.A. in economics, the latter from Oxford University.

Excerpt:

Although the Court has upheld PPACA, the law as currently structured is unworkable. This is because the penalty for not signing up for insurance, which is now termed a tax, $750 a year, is too small relative to the cost of health care coverage, about $5,500 a year.

Since insurance companies are required to take all applicants, healthy people, especially the young, will pay the tax rather than buy the insurance. This makes the pool of insured individuals sicker and more costly, on average, and their premiums will be higher. With higher premiums, more people will choose to pay the tax, and a downward spiral will unfold.

Unless Congress raises the tax to the level of premiums, the system will have to be replaced with a public option.

[…] It is clear that PPACA has severe economic costs, and is at least partially responsible for the slow economic recovery, and needs to be replaced.

PPACA raises employment costs by requiring employers to offer qualifying insurance coverage or pay a penalty—now a tax.  Because this requirement will apply, starting in 2014, to firms with more than 49 full time employees, it will discourage the hiring of full-time workers, especially low-wage hands whose work can more easily be divided among part-timers. Firms with over 49 workers will have to pay $2,000 a year for each employee without qualifying coverage.  Expanding to 50 workers would, in 2014, cost a firm $40,000 a year (the first 30 workers are exempt).

PPACA encourages employers to substitute part-time for full-time workers to avoid the tax. A firm with 60 employees would pay a tax of $60,000 a year if it did not have qualifying health coverage. But if it put 11 workers on part-time, and hired another 11 part-timers, it would not owe a tax, because it would have 49 full-timers. The full-timers who become part-timers and lose salary and benefits would be worse off.

PPACA raises health insurance costs by requiring an overly-generous plan. In order to be counted as a ‘qualified benefit plan’ and be able to sell health insurance in the exchange, an underwriter must cover routine health care—such as check-ups, and contraceptives—without copayment. It must also cover maternity care, mental health and substance abuse.

Unfortunately, plans that encourage shopping around, such as catastrophic plans with large deductibles combined with health savings accounts, where people can save tax-free for medical care, are prohibited by PPACA for Americans ages 30 and above.

A health insurance system needs to be accessible, portable, and inexpensive, just like other forms of insurance.

[…]The same should be true of health insurance. Those who can’t afford it should be offered refundable tax credits, or vouchers, to purchase it themselves, so they can have the same choice of doctors and services as other Americans.

Just as in other forms of insurance, America can lower costs by reducing unnecessary regulation, increasing competition and patient choice. Patients should decide what type of coverage meets their needs, not be told what they must purchase by the federal government.

For example, if some people want their children to be on their insurance plan until age 26, or age 28, or age 30, they should be able to purchase plans that cover their children, at a price. Others who do not have children, or who do not want their children on their plans, should not have to pay the costs.

How would such a system operate?

Congress could give all Americans tax credits for buying health insurance; allow plans to compete over state lines; and set up state risk pools to insure those with uninsurable conditions.

What an excellent article. Her suggestions are also good, and the Republicans have offered a plan to achieve those goals: Paul Ryan’s health care plan.