Tag Archives: Rationing

NHS kills a man’s wife by delaying cancer treatment for 7 months

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

Excerpt:

As an experienced GP, Uday Pathak had good reason to trust his instincts and knowledge when his wife became ill.

The 62-year-old suspected she had cancer and urged medics to carry out an immediate full body scan. Tragically, they delayed for seven months and 54-year-old Pradnya later died of the disease.

[…]When the scan was finally carried out at the University Hospital of North Staffordshire, Stoke-on-Trent, it showed Dr Pathak was correct all along.

Despite six months of chemotherapy, Mrs Pathak, a mother-of-two from Seabridge, Staffordshire, died in December 2008. She had been referred to the respiratory unit in May 2007 with a persistent dry cough.

Four months later, Dr Pathak said he raised the possibility his wife had cancer of the lymphatic system. But it was only in April 2008 that a body scan was carried out by the hospital’s haematology team.

Consultant haematologist Richard Chasty, who saw Mrs Pathak three days before her death, said she may have survived if diagnosed sooner.

The horror is that a man works hard as a doctor in a socialist country for his entire life, slavishly paying half his earnings to the government under the constant threat of imprisonment. They take his money and they spend it on other people who may not even be paying anything. And then finally he has need of care. His own wife, who he has sworn an oath to protect, is taken ill.

He turns to the people who have taken hundreds of thousands of dollars of his money and he asks them for help. And they deny him that help, because they have spent his money on sex change operations to change a prison inmate from a man to a woman, and then back to a man, in order to buy votes from coveted special interest groups who demand “equality” with those who are happy with their biological sex.

He is powerless to intervene to save his wife and must watch as his lifelong partner dies right before his eyes. He has no money to afford private care – it was all paid in taxes. He no longer has money to go abroad to the United States to get treatment, and it is in any case too late to try, anyway.

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How well does government-run health care work in Australia?

From the Sydney Morning Herald. (H/T ECM)

Excerpt:

Westmead Hospital is cancelling surgery at four times the rate the Health Department considers acceptable, and waiting times are so long some surgeons are refusing to add new patients to their operating lists.

About 8 per cent of elective surgery patients at the flagship Sydney University teaching hospital had their operation cancelled on the day of surgery, due to a shortage of post-surgical beds.

[…]Those cancellations – which Professor Fletcher said affected up to half of patients for some types of surgery – were not formally recorded.

[…]Hospitals in western Sydney have suffered staff freezes and bed cuts due to debts that last year reached $26 million.

This is what happens when you take the profit motive out of health care. If there is no way to make money, then there is no free capital that flows into the industry. If there is no free capital, then the only way to expand is by raises taxes. If taxes are already too high, then the only way to control demand is by using waiting lists. And naturally the people in power will favor the special interest groups who vote for them with faster access to treatment.

OAS report details violence and lost freedoms in communist Venezuela

Story from the Washington Post. (H/T Red State)

Excerpt:

THE ORGANIZATION of American States has failed to respond to the steady deterioration of Latin American democracy during the past few years, even though the defense of democracy is supposed to be one of its primary missions. Now the OAS — and governments throughout the region — have been shamed by one of its own branch organizations. Last week, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights issued a searing and authoritative report on the destruction of Venezuela’s political institutions and the erosion of freedom under President Hugo Chávez.

[…]In meticulous detail, the 300-page report documents how Mr. Chávez’s regime has done away with judicial independence, intimidated or eliminated opposition media, stripped elected opposition leaders of their powers, and used bogus criminal charges to silence human rights groups.

[…]Particularly shocking is the commission’s account of the role that violence and murder have played in Mr. Chávez’s concentration of power. The report documents killings of journalists, opposition protesters and farmers; it says that 173 trade union leaders and members were slain between 1997 and 2009 “in the context of trade union violence, with contract killings being the most common method for attacking union leaders.” The report says that in 2008 Venezuela’s human rights ombudsman recorded 134 complaints of arbitrary killings by security forces, 87 allegations of torture and 33 cases of forced disappearance. It also asserts that radical groups allied with Mr. Chávez “are perpetrating acts of violence with the involvement or acquiescence of state agents.”

There has been no accountability for these acts.

Here’s a picture of two socialists, Barack Obama and Hugo Chavez.

Hey, Chavez! Nice job on that torture!

I wonder why Obama and the people who voted for him oppose waterboarding interrogation of mass-murdering terrorists for national security purposes, but sanction actual torture against innocent civilians by Democrat socialist regimes?

But maybe violence isn’t an essential part of the political left’s plan. Neil Simpson has a nice post up about how the socialists can take over the world without using violence. I wonder if they will take him up on that?

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