Tag Archives: Patient

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NHS hospital director dies on surgery waiting list

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From Newsbusters.

Excerpt:

James Taranto at the Wall Street Journal editorial page caught this story about Britain’s National Health Service.

“A former NHS director died after waiting for nine months for an operation–at her own hospital,” London’s Daily Mail reports:

Margaret Hutchon, a former mayor, had been waiting since last June for a follow-up stomach operation at Broomfield Hospital in Chelmsford, Essex.

But her appointments to go under the knife were cancelled four times and she barely regained consciousness after finally having surgery.

Her devastated husband, Jim, is now demanding answers from Mid Essex Hospital Services NHS Trust–the organisation where his wife had served as a non-executive member of the board of directors.

He said: “I don’t really know why she died. I did not get a reason from the hospital. We all want to know for closure. She got weaker and weaker as she waited and operations were put off.”

Dance with the devil, and you get burned.

Here is a recent post I wrote from the libertarian Cato Institute explaining why health care in the USA is superior to health care in socialist countries like the UK and Canada.

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In Alberta, tens of thousands of patients are waiting for surgery

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From Global TV (in Regina). (H/T Jojo)

Excerpt:

As the Alberta Health Services Board gathers to determine the fate of its CEO, tens of thousands of Albertans are still waiting for surgery while complete operating rooms sit empty.

“I was bed ridden for about three months,” says Michel Gosselin, who needs surgery on his back. “I’ve been in pain for a year and two months.”

Dr. Robert Hollingshead, an orthopaedic surgeon, says patients like Michel often wait upwards of a year once they’re finally booked for surgery. It’s a problem doctors and surgeons in all fields face because of a serious shortage of operating rooms in Alberta.

Despite pleas to the Province, little progress has been made even though a number of new operating rooms have been built, including six operating rooms that were originally used by the Health Resource Centre to perform 1,000 public hip, knee and ankle surgeries a year.

However, the Health Resource Centre is now defunct after AHS ended its relationship with the private surgical facility to in October, forcing it into creditor protection.

[…]…AHS opened the McCaig Tower at the Foothills Hospital, touting that it would offer 23 new operating rooms, 11 of which were already complete.

But one month later, less than 2 have been opened.

“It’s a travesty to open 11 state-of-the-art operating rooms in an almost $560-million facility and then open only 2 of them, and in fact, only run 1.4 – they’ve only staffed it for 1.4,” says Dr. Hollingshead.

Fifteen functional operating rooms sit empty in Calgary alone while the health system is so busy that new surgeons will likely have no place to operate.

Dr. Hollingshead predicts if the situation doesn’t improve Alberta could lose as many as 30 graduating surgeons over the next 5 years.

Singple-payer health care in Canada is not as good as the left wants you to believe.

 

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Is it a good idea to give the government money to run health care?

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Consider this article from the UK Daily Mail, which shows how socialized medicine is working out in socialist Europe. (H/T Memeorandum via ECM)

Excerpt:

A ‘man of 21 with learning disabilities has been granted taxpayers’ money to fly to Amsterdam and have sex with a prostitute.

His social worker says sex is a ‘human right’ for the unnamed individual – described as a frustrated virgin.

His trip to a brothel in the Dutch capital’s red light district next month is being funded through a £520million scheme introduced by the last government to empower those with disabilities.

They are given a personal budget and can choose what services this is spent on.

This is what happens when taxpayers hand their own money to bureaucrats to spend. When you have your money in your hand, you use 100% of that money to buy things you want because you need them – like breast cancer exams. But when you give a bureaucrat your money, their goal for spending that money is to buy votes so that they can keep their job and to feel good about themselves. And what makes them feel good about themselves is equalizing life outcomes. They don’t think that anyone should have to face the unhappy consequences of their own decisions.

In some provinces of Canada, sex changes and in vitro fertilization are taxpayer-funded. Abortion is taxpayer-funded in every province. That’s socialized medicine. Equalizing life outcomes by transferring wealth from a person who has money to a person who has a felt need.

Here’s a comprehensive article from The American Spectator that explains what we can expect from our version of socialized medicine, i.e. – “Obamacare”. (H/T ECM)