Posted on 04/02/2011 10:58:56 PM PDT by Mount Athos
A former director of Britain's National Health Service, which runs the country's socialized medicine system, has died while waiting 9 months for an operation. The UK Daily Mail reports:
A former NHS director died after waiting for nine months for an operation - at her own hospital.
Margaret Hutchon, a former mayor, had been waiting since last June for a follow-up stomach operation at Broomfield Hospital in Chelmsford, Essex.
But her appointments to go under the knife were cancelled four times and she barely regained consciousness after finally having surgery.
Her devastated husband, Jim, is now demanding answers from Mid Essex Hospital Services NHS Trust - the organisation where his wife had served as a non-executive member of the board of directors.
I am confident Ms. Hutchon believed in what she did as a socialized medicine official, and her husband's grief deserves our respect and sympathy. But she is a victim of a system that in the name of compassion denies people care.
WTF Barky? She’s either an elitist Exec or a “non” exec... WTF decided Barky?
Run Sarah Run!
System is working. I would be pissed if government officials get ahead of the queue over the citizen
Here's your answer, Jim. Tour wife's death went exactly as planned. By waiting for her to die, they have saved the British subjects her operation cost and aftercare. That's how socialized medicine works, Jim. You aren't allowed to skirt the rules since "fairness" trumps "freedom" where you live and your wife became a victim of the very service she championed as long as the deaths were of other people's wives.
Sorry for your loss, bloke. But those are the cards you were dealt and she lost the NHS lottery. Soon, it will be your turn to experience the same quality of free health care that your wife received. Doesn't that just make your leg tingle, Jim?
Good. I'm impressed that even the elite suffer equally, so kudos to them in that sense. And good that someone complicit in this freedom theft was it's victim instead of another innocent.
What I find amazing is that even elective surgery (when done for medical conditions that pose no real threat to life or well being) can usually be done within 3-5 months if even that here in the US. Of course if this was was 51 instead of 71 she would probably have had the surgery, but as Alan Grayson said...
The answer is "reap what you sow".
The system is broken - it's just more fair than what we will be looking at because those that manage our system will have unfettered access to the best care while the rest of us die waiting...
She got her operation. It’s just that she had to wait nine months. In the nine months she was so weakened by her condition that the operation killed her. So it was an even worse misapplication of medical resources. Instead of operating on her when it could have done her some good, it was postponed long enough to kill her. And if you read the article in the Mail, she was staying in the hospital for some of the nine months and her family voluntarily brought her home to wait. So the management model is instead of promptly operating on someone and freeing up a bed after a couple of weeks, keep them in hospital for nine months and then give them the operation, killing them and consuming an extra eight and a half months of hospital bed. Sounds crazy. I wonder if she had stayed in the hospital if she would have received surgery sooner. The adminstrators may have felt that people who were occupying beds could be gotten rid of more quickly by operating on them.
Six decades ago, a brilliant English writer foresaw the future of socialism, with bureaucrats controlling how we live, think, and die —
“The thought police [National Health Service] would get him just the same. He had committed—would have committed, even if he had never set pen to paper—the essential crime that contained all others in itself. Thoughtcrime, they called it. Thoughtcrime was not a thing that could be concealed forever. You might dodge successfully for a while, even for years, but sooner or later they [DEATH PANELS] were bound to get you.”
- George Orwell, 1984, Book 1, Chapter 1
ML/NJ
Her devastated husband, Jim, is now demanding answers...
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Why doesn’t he just go out and spit at a tsunami?
When we have socialized medicine our health system will be as effective as our socialist government schools.
I think her fatal mistake was going home and off the local adminstrator’s tab. As along as she languished dying at home she wasn’t the NHS’ problem.
It's like this, Jim. From the supply side, you have destroyed an open competitive market and replaced it with a monopoly. From the demand side, you have removed a large diverse group of voluntary consumers and replaced it with a single consumer (government) with undiverse needs.
Here are the results:
Now here's the really sick part. Government fills both roles. It is both supplier and consumer. And the proles are left out of the equation. In essence, there was no incentive for that hospital to hire more doctors to cover their backlog of surgeries. Doing so would cost the monopoly more in cost of goods sold. And there would be no more money coming in from those demanding service.
In essence, socialized medicine is an abysmal failure. And the biggest irony of all is that at a time when Europe and Canada are finally figuring this out, the US is embracing it.
Socialized medicine is not about medicine. It is about control.
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