Wednesday, October 11, 2017

Single Payer Blues

So let's see what our Friends Across the Pond© have been up to. Via our friend Rich W:

"A growing crisis in hospital safety is revealed in official figures showing a doubling in the number of legal warnings issued by NHS watchdogs."

Promising!

The number of "enforcement actions" (basically citations) has more than doubled in the past year, and it doesn't appear that that rate's slowing down:

"Recent actions include a warning notice to Royal Cornwall Hospitals trust after inspectors found patients dying and left to go blind after long waits for treatment."

But hey, free!

On the other hand, it's not as if our own hands are clean:

"VA conceals shoddy care and health workers' mistakes"

Ooops.

Fortunately for those who served our country, putting their lives on the line for all of us, VA healthcare professionals are top-notch.

Oh, wait:

"Medical experts from the Department of Veterans Affairs blamed one botched surgery after another on a lone podiatrist ... In 88 cases, the VA concluded, Franchini made mistakes that harmed veterans."

Good thing the VA bureauweenies caught him in time, and that he paid a severe penalty.

"They let him quietly resign and move on to private practice, then failed for years to disclose his past ... He now works as a podiatrist in New York City."

Oy.

Okay, well then, good thing this was just a one-off.

Sigh:

"In other cases, veterans’ hospitals signed secret settlement deals with dozens of doctors, nurses and health care workers that included promises to conceal serious mistakes ."

Words fail.

On the bright side, it's not as if single payer systems promote murdering patients to save precious and scarce health care dollars, right?

Um, you may want to be sitting down for this:

"Now, in Canada, a doctor can not only deny life-saving treatment for a person in their right mind who wants it, but actually have that patient, against the patient’s will and with their full mental faculties, outright executed by lethal injection."

"Free" health care: worth every penny you pay for it.
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