Tag Archives: Obama

One million NHS patients receive brutally inadequate health care

Story from the UK Telegraph. (H/T Andrew)

Excerpt:

In the last six years, the Patients Association claims hundreds of thousands have suffered from poor standards of nursing, often with ‘neglectful, demeaning, painful and sometimes downright cruel’ treatment.

The charity has disclosed a horrifying catalogue of elderly people left in pain, in soiled bed clothes, denied adequate food and drink, and suffering from repeatedly cancelled operations, missed diagnoses and dismissive staff.

The Patients Association said the dossier proves that while the scale of the scandal at Mid-Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust – where up to 1,200 people died through failings in urgent care – was a one off, there are repeated examples they have uncovered of the same appalling standards throughout the NHS.
While the criticisms cover all aspects of hospital care, the treatment and attitude of nurses stands out as a repeated theme across almost all of the cases.

I don’t think the sharp decline of religion in the UK has helped the character of the medical staff very much. Although some atheists are pretty good, I have argued elsewhere that it is pretty hard to rationally justify acts of self-sacrifice on atheism. It just isn’t rational to do good when it goes against your self-interest.

And here’s another terrifying one from the Telegraph. (H/T Secondhand Smoke via ECM)

Excerpt:

Thousands of women and older people who suffer heart attacks are dying unnecessarily because they are not being prescribed the gold standard treatment which could prevent another attack. One in five people who have had a heart attack in Britain do not receive all four drugs recommended to prevent a second, a study of 60,000 people have found.

[…]Lead author Prof Iain Squire, professor of cardiovascular medicine at University of Leicester and consultant at the Leicester Royal Infirmary, calculated that 2,000 out of the 5,000 deaths over the two year study period had been undertreated and ‘could potentially have been avoided’. He said: “The patients who are most likely to get undertreated are the elderly and females but they get incremental benefit for each drug they take so we should not be withholding these therapies based on age and gender alone.” People aged 65 to 74 were 20 per cent less likely to get all four drugs compared with those under 55; while people aged over 85 were three times less likely to get all four medicines.

Let’s be clear. The left believes in myths like overpopulation, global warming, survival of the fittest, etc. Their denial of God makes them terribly afraid of the future. So they begin to dream up ways to stop the unwashed masses from using too many resources or from wrecking the planet. Naturally, the first thing they want to do is to prevent people from having children, or living too long. Hence, abortion and eugenics.

Previous NHS horror story posts are here.

Canada cuts deal with US hospitals to reduce waiting times

UPDATE: Welcome, visitors from Blazing Cat Fur!

Story from the Detroit Free Press. (H/T Health Care BS via ECM)

Excerpt:

Hospitals in border cities, including Detroit, are forging lucrative arrangements with Canadian health agencies to provide care not widely available across the border.

Agreements between Detroit hospitals and the Ontario Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care for heart, imaging tests, bariatric and other services provide access to some services not immediately available in the province, said ministry spokesman David Jensen.

The agreements show how a country with a national care system — a proposal not part of the health care changes under discussion in Congress — copes with demand for care with U.S. partnerships, rather than building new facilities.

I am not so sure that we should be adopting single-payer health care. Who can we cut a deal with to reduce our waiting list delays?

Obama cuts off aid to pressure Honduras into communist dictatorship

Post from Hans Bader at the CEI’s Open market blog.

Excerpt:

The Obama Administration is about to cut off aid to Honduras, one of the poorest countries in the Western Hemisphere. Earlier, the Obama Administration blocked travel to the United States by the people of Honduras.

[…]State Department lawyers, who are not experts on Honduran law, plan to declare the ex-president’s removal a “military coup” to justify cutting off aid, even though Honduras has a civilian president, and the ex-president was lawfully removed from office (although his subsequent exile may technically have violated Honduran law).

[…]Confronted with the sound legal basis for removing the ex-president under his country’s constitution, the Obama Administration has responded with a series of increasingly weak rationalizations for stubbornly seeking to force his return on the Honduran people.

[…]Obama’s demand that Obama reinstate its would-be dictator has emboldened other elected leaders in Latin America to try to make themselves dictators. (Even the liberal Washington Post, which has not endorsed a Republican for president since 1952, admitted in an editorial by Deputy Editorial Page Editor Jackson Diehl that the Obama Administration has shown a “willful disregard of political oppression” by left-wing dictators in Latin America).

Obama’s demand that Honduras’s ex-president be returned to office has been supported by the Cuban communist dictator Castro and the Venezuelan socialist dictator Chavez, who counted Honduras’s deposed president as an ally, despite his background as a wealthy and corrupt landowner.

But allying with Castro and Chavez to force the return of Honduras’s would-be dictator has not even improved U.S. relations with their countries. The dictators Castro and Chavez continue to attack and oppose the United States at every turn, and oppose all of its Latin American initiatives, like its plans for bases in Colombia to fight drug trafficking. Obama has received nothing in exchange for his appeasement of Latin America’s left.

The article details the flaws in Obama’s support for a communist dictatorship in Honduras.