A look at UK healthcare – the future of Obamacare?
Some of the horror stories that occur in the British healthcare system may be read in the “UK Government-Run Healthcare System: Soiled Bedclothes, Starving Patients” article by Daniel J. Mitchell in the latest issue of Townhall.
The UK healthcare system’s rationing is well known. With its “one size fits all,” government controlled, inadequately funded, overburdened medical healthcare providers and inefficient, incompetent, sloppy hospital system, which provides healthcare for all, at supposedly less cost, is unfathomable compared to the healthcare in America that Obamacare seeks to replace.
The largest and most detailed survey into hospital deaths has revealed that almost 12,000 patients are needlessly dying every year as a result of poor patient care. The researchers from The London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine based the study on 1,000 deaths at 10 NHS trusts during 2009.
The study revealed that basic errors were made in more than one in 10 cases, leading to 5.2% of deaths, which was the equivalent of nearly 12,000 preventable deaths in hospitals in England every year. The research published in the British Medical Journal’s Quality and Safety publication found that errors occurred when hospital staff made an incorrect diagnosis, prescribed the wrong drugs, failed to monitor a patient’s condition or react when a patient deteriorated.
Errors in omission were more frequent than active mistakes. The majority of patients who died were elderly suffering with multiple health conditions, but the study found that some patients whose deaths were preventable were aged in their 30s and 40s.
More excerpts if you can believe them:
Hundreds of hospital patients died needlessly. In the wards, people lay starving, thirsty and in soiled bedclothes, buzzers droning hopelessly as their cries for help went ignored. Some received the wrong medication; some, none at all.
Decisions about which patients to treat were left to receptionists…and nurses switched off equipment because they did not know how to use it. …patients were left so dehydrated that some began drinking from flower vases.
Patients were left without medication, food and drink, and left on commodes. Basic hygiene was neglected: a woman was left unwashed for the last four weeks of her life. Relatives tried to keep their loved ones clean, scrubbing down beds and furniture and even bringing in clean linen. One consultant described how amid the chaos, it seemed as though nurses became “immune to the sound of pain”.
There are many more links and references throughout the article if you are willing to visualize some of these scenarios. It is a difficult task.
It never ceases to amaze me that our so-called government experts, fail to see what is obvious to the most casual observer, that the path our government has chosen, both financially and with respect to healthcare, has already been traveled by the UK and many European-socialistic countries and they have lost their way – yet America continues down the same path?