In a situation that is all too common in single-payer, government-run medical systems such as those in Canada and Great Britain, a man in England died last week of a heart attack after his surgery was delayed because his doctor called in sick fifteen minutes before the operation was to take place. The Times of London reports:
A RETIRED businessman died of a suspected heart attack just 24 hours after his heart operation had been cancelled at the last minute.
The day after John Mosley, 65, died a nurse phoned his widow to give her a new date for the operation. . . .
Mr Mosley had already had pre-op medicine for a heart valve operation at the Northern General Hospital in Sheffield when it was cancelled. Just 15 minutes before he was due in the operating theatre, his surgeon called in sick. . . .
Mrs Mosley said yesterday: “We feel we have been robbed. We feel if he had had his operation he would still be here today. The coroner has confirmed that he died because his heart valve packed up. I am hurt and very angry at the National health Service.
“The day after he died a nurse phoned me to say would he go in on Sunday, ready to be operated on the following day. I said, ‘He won’t be there. He has died.’
“I said if it had been done last Monday he would still be here. They could only apologise. I haven’t heard anything since then. I would have hoped someone would have phoned me.”
She added: “That would have helped a bit and it would have meant something to me. My son will complain to the hospital. There is nothing else we can do.”
She is right, of course. There is nothing else they can do. That is the reality of single-payer systems.
7 comments:
I recall a WSJ article about the Canadian Health Service in which patients literally begged not to be sent home after being rescheduled for the umpteenth time. The Canadian bureaucrat in charge said that waiting must be a part of any efficient health system. She's right, in a sense. If you don't have prices in the monetary sense, there will be a substitute, in this case, time. Unfortunately, it may be worse to run out of time than to run out of money.
Seeing how governments appear to be less and less accountable these days, under nationalized health care there will be no redress of grievances for families such as this, who lose loved ones due to government failure.
In the free market, this doctor would be out of a job, and the hospital would be out of untold millions in damages, since the government has no problem with private individuals paying for their mistakes.
But the government, no matter how "compassionate", will never pay.
And the American Left will never learn.
See, what you ought to do is look at ACTUAL proposed national health programs from the Left. They don't resemble the Canadian and European systems. The best of them might best be compared to the school voucher systems y'all love so dearly.
Why would I want to look at an ACTUAL proposed program. We had ACTUAL proposals on what the War on Poverty and Social Security would cost and they were bogus beyond belief. Better to look at ACTUAL ACTUAL programs in existence.
That's a nonsense answer.
No, your reply is nonsense. I'm saying you get a better understanding of how these things work out in reality by observing reality. Pretty simple. Pretty much the opposite of nonsense.
Has anyone seen Queen Elizabeth in a hospital waiting room? Cherie Blair?
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