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Never did three words, surely, have a more explosive and utterly disproportionate effect. In a Commons debate last week on the deficiencies of the new 111 emergency service, a Tory MP, Anne McIntosh, suggested one reason why there were too few GPs to answer urgent calls. Since some 70 per cent of medical students were now women, she said, the fact that many of them wanted to have children and then go part-time meant a ‘tremendous burden’ on the NHS if it effectively had to train two GPs to do the work of one. In reply the junior Health Minister...

British politicians used to boast that the National Health Service was — and some left-wing holdouts maintain it still is — “the envy of the world.”These days, beset by scandal after scandal and facing spiraling costs, the NHS would be lucky to attract a covetous glance from an accident-prone Somali, and any U.S. conservative who doubts the urgency of stopping Obamacare before it can be fully implemented would do well to pay attention to the disaster unfolding across the pond. A report released last week revealed that as many as 13,000 patients may have died unnecessarily in NHS hospitals...

The NHS’s medical director will spell out the failings of 14 trusts in England, which between them have been responsible for up to 13,000 “excess deaths” since 2005. Prof Sir Bruce Keogh will describe how each hospital let its patients down badly through poor care, medical errors and failures of management, and will show that the scandal of Stafford Hospital, where up to 1,200 patients died needlessly, was not a one-off.  Show that the warning signs were there for managers and ministers to see, including alarming levels of infections, patients suffering from neglect and appalling blunders such as surgery performed...

Proponents of President Obama’s “Affordable Care Act” often suggest skeptics look across the Atlantic to the United Kingdom as an example of what can be made better with the American health care system. But doctors in the United Kingdom have about had it, it seems, calling their own system “worse than Communist China.” A recent report in the U.K. Telegraph chronicles the conclusions of the British Medical Association’s annual conference, where doctors loudly lamented the undue power of abusive managers and bureaucrats, who seem to have as much or more power in hospitals than the actual doctors. “The result is...

Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt today came under growing pressure to name and shame the NHS bosses responsible for covering up their failure to investigate a hospital where up to 16 babies died through neglect.

Britain's National Health Service (NHS) turns 65 years old this week. Despite its much heralded presence in Britain’s health care, the problems of the NHS are severe, notorious, and increasingly scandalous in the most fundamental attributes of any health care system: access and quality. Waits for care are shocking in the NHS, frequently exposed by British media reports, and long proven by facts, yet they go virtually unreported in the U.S. For instance, in 2010, about one-third of England’s NHS patients deemed ill enough by their GP waited more than one additional month for a specialist appointment. In 2008-2009, the...

Half of all voters consider radical Muslims the bigger terrorist threat facing the nation, but supporters of President Obama consider the Tea Party to be as big a danger. A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 51% of Likely U.S. Voters consider radical Muslims to be the bigger threat to the United States today. Thirteen percent (13%) view the Tea Party that way, and another 13% consider other political and religious extremists to be the larger danger. Six percent (6%) point to local militia groups. Two percent (2%) see the Occupy Wall Street movement as the bigger terrorist...

The psychiatrists in Britain's basket-case National Health Service certainly have the words; but the construction comes from real estate: Denial, Denial, Denial. Do you have the words to convey your horror at the sheer contempt for patients expressed today by the Chairman of the British Medical Association, effectively the state sector doctors' union in the UK? Speaking at a conference, and as reported by ITV, Dr Mark Porter said: "We all want urgent care at weekends and evenings to be of the same high standards as patients can expect on weekdays. "But the calls we sometimes hear for a Tesco...

With the implementation of Obamacare in full-swing, Americans are worried about the prospects of government-run health care. To see the damage centralized health care can do to patients, Americans need only look “across the pond” to England. There, the British government-run health care system — which pays for abortions with taxpayer funds and has been criticized for pushing euthanasia — is literally leaving patients needing lifesaving medical treatment to die. The London Daily Mail newspaper profiles Stewart Fleming, whose wife Sarah took a picture on her smartphone as he waited six agonizing hours for medical care and attention for a...

Terminally ill patients are dying prematurely because of a controversial 'death pathway' being followed by NHS doctors. Medical experts have warned some patients are being wrongly labelled as close to dying when they still have months to live. They say the system used by the Health Service and many care homes could amount to 'backdoor euthanasia'. Under the Liverpool Care Pathway, doctors can withdraw fluids and drugs from patients if they are deemed close to death. Many are then put on continuous sedation so they die free of pain. But sedation can often mask signs of improvement, meaning doctors may...

An average hospital stay in London is £300. An average overnight stay in a four star hotel in the capital costs £120. Where would you rather stay? It's a no brainer of course. Give me a hotel any time. Even when a hospital patient is recuperating and no longer needs to rely on medical equipment, the cost to the NHS is £300. The patient will be treated to shared wards and toilet facilities, tasteless food, the barkings of over-worked nurses, and the horrific lights and noises of a working hospital. Moreover, they will feel isolated (visiting hours in most hospitals...

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has responded to a letter dated November 13, 2012 from Senator Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) regarding the agency's ammunition purchases. Sen. Coburn published the response on the U.S. Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs website yesterday, April 1, 2013. The response, dated February 4, 2013, says that DHS buys ammunition in bulk to "significantly lower costs."

As many as 1,165 people starved to death in NHS hospitals over the past four years fuelling claims nurses are too busy to feed their patients. The Department of Health branded the figures 'unacceptable' and said the number of unannounced inspections by the care watchdog will increase. According to figures released by the Office for National Statistics following a Freedom of Information request, for every patient who dies from malnutrition, four more have dehydration mentioned on their death certificate.

An NHS watchdog has imposed a recruitment freeze on foreign nurses amid fears that workers could have faked documents to get jobs in British hospitals. Nursing regulators admit they do not know how many immigrant workers could have fraudulently secured frontline health positions after faking evidence of their qualifications, experience or identity. The freeze means that around 160 nurses are being prevented from filling vacancies in already stretched NHS units, while the Nursing and Midwifery Council conducts the urgent investigation into its own failings. The astonishing disclosure comes after a week in which the regulator was heavily criticised by MPs.

Up to two-thirds of doctors and nurses at some hospitals would not recommend that their family and friends are treated where they work, internal NHS figures disclose on Friday. Staff at North Cumbria University Hospitals and United Lincolnshire Hospitals are the least likely to recommend treatment, according to figures that are being scrutinised closely by ministers. Less than 40 per cent of those employed at the trusts, both of which have relatively high death rates, would recommend the treatment available, compared with more than 90 per cent of staff at the top-rated hospitals. Nationally, almost 40 per cent of NHS...

Women in Britain are dying quicker of breast cancer than in comparable countries, even though they are being diagnosed at the same time, suggesting care on the NHS is not as good as it is elsewhere. Academics at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine found the proportion of women in the UK surviving at least three years after being diagnosed was 87 to 89 percent, which was similar to Denmark. In Australia, Canada, Norway and Sweden three-year survival was 91 to 94 per cent for the period examined, between 2000 and 2007. Britain’s breast cancer survival rates have...

An excruciating irony of Obamacare is that its architects modeled many of its features after the UK’s National Health Service (NHS). The NHS is a classic system of socialized medicine, and a monumental failure by any objective standard. Yet many of its features were enthusiastically built into the “Affordable Care Act.” The most obvious example is Obamacare’s rationing committee, the Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB), which was consciously made in the image of Great Britain’s National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE). And lest you think I exaggerate the failures of the NHS, you can verify my characterization by...

Data grab: Doctors will be forced to hand over sensitive information about patients as part of a new programme called Everyone Counts but campaigners have criticised the move The data includes weight, cholesterol levels, body mass index, pulse rate, family health history, alcohol consumption and smoking status. Diagnosis of everything from cancer to heart disease to mental illness would be covered. Family doctors will have to pass on dates of birth, postcodes and NHS numbers. . . .

Hospitals are denying patients the latest life-extending cancer drugs, a report reveals. Dozens of trusts are failing to hand out treatments for bowel, ovarian, lung and brain cancer that have been approved by the NHS watchdog NICE. Some of these drugs have been shown to boost survival rates by a quarter while others have extended the lives of terminally-ill patients by over a year. The report - commissioned by the Department of Health - also reveals that many hospitals are failing to prescribe the latest treatments for heart attacks, asthma, multiple sclerosis, arthritis and Crohn’s Disease. In fact some of...

Hospitals are denying patients the latest life-extending cancer drugs, a report reveals. Dozens of trusts are failing to hand out treatments for bowel, ovarian, lung and brain cancer that have been approved by the NHS watchdog NICE. Some of these drugs have been shown to boost survival rates by a quarter while others have extended the lives of terminally-ill patients by over a year.