This is what you get when government runs your health care:
Britain’s most senior accident and emergency doctor told The Sunday Telegraph that four weeks of intense pressures had left casualty departments “overwhelmed” with patients.
He said desperately sick people had been left for hours waiting on trolleys, with even those requiring intensive care enduring long delays.
Dozens of NHS units have cancelled surgery and clinics for outpatients. At least 10 major centres issued “black alerts” — the highest emergency warning — meaning they were at breaking point, forcing patients to be sent elsewhere…
…John Heyworth… expressed anger about the failure of Government and the NHS to develop sufficient contingency plans, given that a flu outbreak was widely anticipated following the swine flu pandemic in 2009…
I can understand that anger, but if anyone tries to tell me they’re surprised about this, I’ll laugh at them. Where, to a government bureaucrat, is the upside to being prepared for a flu pandemic? Think about it – if you lay in supplies and get things carefully organized for such an event, then all you’ve done is expend resources for patients. And what if the crisis doesn’t happen? How are you going to justify all that expense when it proves ultimately un-necessary? Always best to bank on best case scenarios and count on crisis management to get you through the rough patches, even if they cost the taxpayers 10 times as much as preparation would have.
Any NHS administrator knows that his primary clients are elected officials who want to keep costs down (and thus would ask questions about expenditures for things which only might happen) and union leaders (patient health or more pay and benefits for the union workers; where do you think a union boss will come down?) – it was natural that nothing would be done about the prospect of lots of people getting sick. To a national health system, patients are simply an annoyance – and an expensive annoyance, in to the bargain. They complain, they take up space, you have to deal with awkward questions when you’ve left a clamp inside a patient’s body after surgery – nothing but a bother. And if you do try to please those people (who are, after all, going to die eventually, right?), then you’ve got less money for pay hikes, new construction and all the things which will actually make your job go smoother.
And that is the way it is, my fellow Americans – and it is the way Obama and his Democrats want to have it. Because they really believe that a faceless bureaucrat can make things better for people. Why they believe this is another story, and seems to revolve around a lack of common-sense among our self-described “reality-based community”. Be that as it may, we must repeal and replace – unless we want to have British level care come to the United States.
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