Tag Archives: Public Option

News

UK report finds “unimaginable” suffering in government-run hospital

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Story here in the UK Times. (H/T ECM)

Excerpt:

Patients were routinely neglected or left “sobbing and humiliated” by staff at an NHS trust where at least 400 deaths have been linked to appalling care.

An independent inquiry found that managers at Mid Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust stopped providing safe care because they were preoccupied with government targets and cutting costs.

Staff shortages at Stafford Hospital meant that patients went unwashed for weeks, were left without food or drink and were even unable to get to the lavatory. Some lay in soiled sheets that relatives had to take home to wash, others developed infections or had falls, occasionally fatal. Many staff did their best but the attitude of some nurses “left a lot to be desired”.

The report, which follows reviews by the Care Quality Commission and the Department of Health, said that “unimaginable” suffering had been caused. Regulators said last year that between 400 and 1,200 more patients than expected may have died at the hospital from 2005 to 2008.

Andy Burnham, the Health Secretary, said there could be “no excuses” for the failures and added that the board that presided over the scandal had been replaced. An undisclosed number of doctors and at least one nurse are being investigated by the General Medical Council and Nursing and Midwifery Council.

[…]Some NHS chief executives have received six-figure redundancy packages or moved to other trusts despite poor performance. Martin Yeates, the former chief executive at Mid Staffordshire, received pay rises that took his annual salary to £180,000, while standards at the trust deteriorated.

We need to learn from the experiences of other countries with socialism.

Related posts

    Videos

    George Will explains Obama’s dependency agenda at CPAC 2010

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    From Muddling Towards Maturity: George Will’s speech at the 2010 CPAC convention. He is a moderate conservative.

    Part 1:

    Topics: the conflict of freedom and equality, equal outcomes vs equal opportunities, wealth redistribution vs liberty, dependency on government, public sector vs private sector, cash for clunkers, state capitalism, credit, crony capitalism, subsidizing failure, TARP, profit and loss, risk, incentives, freedom to succeed or fail, cradle to grave welfare, SCHIP, socialized medicing, single payer health care, social security, medicare, vouchers, school choice, public education, public option, choice and competition, inter-state commerce.

    Part 2:

    Topics: health savings accounts, private property, stewardship and ownership, drug companies, health insurance, dependency agenda, entitlement mentality, lawsuits, trial lawyer lobby, tort reform, personal responsibility, stimulus, public and private sector wages and benefits, union payoffs, income tax, moral hazard, death tax, envy, farm subsidies, bureaucracy, schools vs families.

    Here’s the graph he mentions of who pays for taxespays for taxes. High earners pay for everything and the low earners pay for nothing. High earners don’t depend on government but low earners do depend on government.

    Part 3:

    Topics: crisis as a means to enlarge government, manufacturing a crisis using massive deficits, environmentalism as a manufactured crisis, how bigger government means small individuals with less freedom, structure of american government, the founding fathers, free will, personal responsibility, small government.

    By the way, many people are saying that Glenn Beck’s speech was the best of the conference. And you can watch it here at Caffeinated Thoughts. The best part starts at 25:25 minutes in where he explains being broke and turning his life around, and talking about the freedom to fail and personal responsibility.

    UPDATE: ECM sent me this article about George Will’s appearance on ABC’s This Week.

    Video:

    Excerpt:

    TERRY MORAN, HOST: There’s a sense that something is broken in Washington summed up this week by Senator Evan Bayh (D-Ind.) who announced his retirement. I think it’s fair to say he’s leaving in disgust. Here’s what he had to say.

    SENATOR EVAN BAYH, (D-IND.): I have had a growing conviction that Congress is not operating as it should. There is much too much partisanship, and not enough progress. Too much narrow ideology, and not enough practical problem solving. Even at a time of enormous national challenge, the people’s business is not getting done.

    MORAN: Is he right, George?
    GEORGE WILL: Well, it’s hard to take a lecture on bipartisanship from a man who voted against the confirmation of Chief Justice Roberts, the confirmation of Justice Alito, the confirmation of Attorney General Ashcroft, the confirmation of Condoleezza Rice as Secretary of State. Far from being a rebel against his Party’s lockstep movement, Mr. Bayh voted for the Detroit bailout, for the stimulus, for the public option in the healthcare bill. I don’t know quite what his complaint is, but, Terry, with metronomic regularity, we go through these moments in Washington where we complain about the government being broken. These moments have one thing in common: The Left is having trouble enacting its agenda. No one when George W. Bush had trouble reforming Social Security said, “Oh, that’s terrible – the government’s broken.”

    Commentary

    The Wall Street Journal explains what Obamacare will mean to you

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    Amazing article in the Wall Street Journal. (H/T ECM)

    Here are a few of the points made in the article.

    1) The bill is being rammed through behind closed doors, with no Republican input.

    Mr. Obama promised a new era of transparent good government, yet on Saturday morning Mr. Reid threw out the 2,100-page bill that the world’s greatest deliberative body spent just 17 days debating and replaced it with a new “manager’s amendment” that was stapled together in covert partisan negotiations. Democrats are barely even bothering to pretend to care what’s in it, not that any Senator had the chance to digest it in the 38 hours before the first cloture vote at 1 a.m. this morning. After procedural motions that allow for no amendments, the final vote could come at 9 p.m. on December 24.

    2) Health care costs will increase if the bill passes.

    The best and most rigorous cost analysis was recently released by the insurer WellPoint, which mined its actuarial data in various regional markets to model the Senate bill. WellPoint found that a healthy 25-year-old in Milwaukee buying coverage on the individual market will see his costs rise by 178%. A small business based in Richmond with eight employees in average health will see a 23% increase. Insurance costs for a 40-year-old family with two kids living in Indianapolis will pay 106% more. And on and on.

    3) Americans will have fewer choices.

    Unnoticed by the press corps, the Congressional Budget Office argued recently that the Senate bill would so “substantially reduce flexibility in terms of the types, prices, and number of private sellers of health insurance” that companies like WellPoint might need to “be considered part of the federal budget.”

    4) The quality of care will be diminished.

    Ultimately, “our capacity to innovate and develop new therapies would suffer most of all,” as Harvard Medical School Dean Jeffrey Flier recently wrote in our pages. Take the $2 billion annual tax—rising to $3 billion in 2018—that will be leveled against medical device makers, among the most innovative U.S. industries.

    5) Your taxes will almost certainly increase.

    Other budget priorities like education will be crowded out when about 21% of the U.S. population is on Medicaid, the joint state-federal program intended for the poor. Nebraska Governor Dave Heineman calculates that ObamaCare will result in $2.5 billion in new costs for his state that “will be passed on to citizens through direct or indirect taxes and fees,” as he put it in a letter to his state’s junior Senator.

    And it continues on. At one point, you may notice that the article says that private medical insurers will be forced to convert into public utilities administered by the federal government. You can read more about that here. (H/T ECM)

    Excerpt:

    One telling sign of the relevance of this analysis comes from the Congressional Budget Office (“CBO”). In a recent release, it has treated the proposal as if it nationalizes much of the private health insurance industry, most specifically because it may well require that rebates to customers kick in whenever, in its words, “medical loss ratios are less than 90 percent.”[2] In plain English, the Reid Bill assumes that health-care administration, which is always costly, can be done cheaply even in the new legal environment, so cheaply in fact that these health-insurance rebates kick in whenever insurers’ administrative expenses exceed 10 percent of their premium dollar. As the CBO has concluded, “this further expansion of the federal government’s role in the health insurance market would make such insurance an essentially governmental program …”

    In effect, the onerous obligations under the Reid Bill would convert private health insurance companies into virtual public utilities. This action is not only a source of real anxiety but also a decision of constitutional proportions, for it systematically strips the regulated health-insurance issuers of their constitutional entitlement to earn a reasonable rate of return on the massive amounts of capital that they have already invested in building out their businesses.

    Yesterday, I posted about the CBO estimates for this bill coming in at 2.5 trillion, with 1 trillion dollars of new taxes. Before that, I mentioned that dissenters like Ben Nelson are receiving special grants of taxpayer money for their states in order to change their vote, despite the fact that the health care bill will use the tax dollars of pro-lifers to perform abortions. Please consider calling your members of the House of Representatives to tell them to vote no on this bill!