Tag Archives: Socialism

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Police probe death of NHS hospital patient who begged for water

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Story here from the UK Telegraph. (H/T ECM)

Excerpt:

A hospital patient, Kane Gorny, died of dehydration after becoming so desperate for a drink of water that he called police for help.

The 22-year-old was not given vital medication after an operation at St George’s Hospital in Tooting, south London, according to his mother.

A coroner has such grave concerns about the case that it has been referred to police who are investigating Mr Gorny’s care.

[…]His mother, Rita Cronin, says he needed drugs three times a day to regulate his hormones, but he was not given them by hospital staff.

She said he became very dehydrated but his requests for water were refused and nurses called in security guards to restrain him when he became angry.

He became so frustrated that he rang the police from his bed to demand their help but officers were assured Mr Gorny was fine.

She said nurses assumed he was just badly behaved.

Mr Gorny’s cause of death was determined to be dehydration.

The UK Daily Mail adds:

Miss Cronin… said: ‘The police told me he’d said, “Please help me. All I want is a drink and no one is helping me”.

[…]’I told three nurses there was something wrong with my son and they said, “He’s fine” and walked off. I started to cry and a locum doctor who was there told me not to worry.

[…]His mother added: ‘When I went back to the hospital I was told that all the nurses had been offered counselling as they were so traumatised, but nothing was offered to me.

‘The whole thing is a disgrace. This hospital has a brilliant reputation and boasts of its excellent standards and safety record.

‘But as soon as my son walked into that ward, his death warrant was signed. Of the 32 people who were involved in my son’s care, every one made a mistake that ultimately led to his death, from the consultant to the care assistant.

‘There has been an internal investigation but St George’s never made it public and it was a whitewash-After his death the hospital never phoned me or wrote to me to apologise. How could this happen in the 21st century?’

When you buy something from someone, you stand a much better chance of getting quality service from them if you have the money in your hand and you can take that money somewhere else if you are not satisfied with the offer in front of you. That’s why free market capitalism is great for the consumer, but it sucks for the corporations. The corporations have to compete to give you what you want at the lowest price. But when government takes over a service, you have no choice. It’s a monopoly, and you dance to their tune. They get paid through tax money whether they give you what you want or not!

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Outgoing UK Labour government aims to make sex education compulsory

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Story here at MercatorNet. (H/T Betsy at RuthBlog)

The problem:

We have now had massive schemes of propaganda on sexual issues pushed at the young for decades. Schools arrange talks and brochures, demonstrations and films about contraception and abortion, making official links with abortion providers and with clinics which give youngsters contraceptives without parental knowledge or consent. Posters urge youngsters to consider whether or not they are lesbian or homosexual, and how to feel good about it if they decide they are.

The result? The teenage pregnancy rate has soared, and the problem of sexually-transmitted diseases among the young is now so huge that supermarkets and youth clubs have joined health centres and schools in giving information about how to obtain medical help for these potentially lethal illnesses.

Fewer and fewer young people are marrying. Of those who do, many divorce – especially if they have been living together beforehand. Many people in their twenties, attempting marriage, have had multiple sexual partners. Many girls bring to marriage a background of more than one abortion, with its consequent physical and psychological damage. Almost half of all births are now out of wedlock. Children born to unmarried couples have only a slim chance of remaining in contact with both parents by the time they reach puberty as most such relationships break up before then.

The secular left’s solution:

And into this grisly scene the government is bringing – yes, you’ve guessed it – more sex education. Under legislation now in Parliament (Children Schools and Families Bill), sex and relationships education will be a compulsory part of the statutory National Curriculum. Parents will continue to have the right to withdraw their children from these classes, but only up to the age of 15. After that they must attend classes which include information on “how and where to obtain information about health and sex advice” — to wit, your local family planning/abortion clinic. This is to ensure they get at least 12 months of amoral, utilitarian sex education before finishing compulsory schooling.

However, there is no opt-out at any stage for schools. Faith schools — which constitute a third of all schools in Britain — will have to teach a curriculum that starts with talking to five-year-olds about bodily changes, teaches “different relationships” (of which marriage is only one) from the age of seven, and everything else from the age of 11 — including same-sex relationships, contraception and abortion.

There was a time when I wanted to be a teacher. Can you imagine that? I thought that I would teach children English literature, mathematics and computer science. And I wanted to get married and to have children, too. Is this what I have to look forward to if I try?The government indoctrinating my children in self-destructive behavior? Who votes for these people on the political left, anyway? Why do we keep looking to government to “solve” our problems with government-run public schools and taxpayer-funded social programs?

The total cost to taxpayers of the family breakdown and out-of-wedlock births is 112 billion dollars a year in the United States, and it will only go higher as we keep using public schools to push children to engage in sexual activity as a form of recreation, without their parents’ consent.

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How good are politicians at projecting the costs of social programs?

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From Big Government. (H/T ECM)

Excerpt:

Look back at when Medicare was first created:

At its start, in 1966, Medicare cost $3 billion. The House Ways and Means Committee estimated that Medicare would cost only about $ 12 billion by 1990 (a figure that included an allowance for inflation). This was a supposedly “conservative” estimate. But in 1990 Medicare actually cost $107 billion.

In 2007, total Medicare spending was $431 billion! That isn’t even close to the costs predicted in 1965. Why do we act like the numbers coming out of Congress and the CBO have any basis in reality?

The predictions for Medicaid were just as wrong:

In 1987, Congress projected that Medicaid – the joint federal-state health care program for the poor – would make special relief payments to hospitals of less than $1 billion in 1992. Actual cost: $17 billion.

The list goes on. The 1993 cost of Medicare’s home care benefit was projected in 1988 to be $4 billion, but ended up at $10 billion. The State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP), which was created in 1997 and projected to cost $5 billion per year, has had to be supplemented with hundreds of millions of dollars annually by Congress.

This is always good thing to remember when people try to pass massive new programs – and this goes for Republicans too, e.g. – Bush’s Medicare prescription drug benefit. Blech!