http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysis/Article.aspx?id=522283American health care is not British health care, at least not yet. But if Democrats get their way, this country will rush to adopt a system much like the one that is killing people in Great Britain.
Democrats will say that what they have planned for U.S. health care is not a copy of the British system, though it's been held up by the left as the model for years. But a nationalized health care system, no matter how it's tailored, will collapse like other socialist programs. Government-run health care may at times look like it works, but it is unsustainable — and deadly.
Consider the British hospital that was the focus of a recently completed independent inquiry. According to U.K. media reports, the review found that at least 400 and as many as 1,200 patients died from 2005 to 2008 because of poor care at Mid-Stratfordshire National Health Service Trust.
The final report did not include those figures (they apparently were used in a draft of the document). But a consultant involved in the inquiry admits that even if no specific figure can be assigned the number of needless deaths, the fact that such deaths did occur indicates a serious problem at the hospital.
At the root of these grave troubles are hospital managers — bureaucrats — who, according to a Times of London report, "stopped providing safe care because they were preoccupied with government targets and cutting costs."
The 455-page report is packed with examples that should be the shame of the British health care system. It documents patient deaths due to what appear to be cases of neglect and misdiagnoses. There are records of patients falling, developing infections, left sitting on toilets and not properly fed.
Author Robert Francis says he heard "many accounts of bad care, denials of dignity and unnecessary suffering" from witnesses during his review.
The inquiry also noted "serious departures from the standard of basic care which every patient is entitled to expect" — abuses of elderly patients, a culture of bullying, low staff morale and concerns about the "attitude of staff to patients" as well as to visitors.
Even staff members "lived in an atmosphere of fear," in part due to "the managerial styles of some senior managers."
Judging by the report, the hospital resembled a landfill or sewage treatment plant as much as it did a house of healing. Patients went unwashed, as did their bedding, which was "soiled with urine and feces for considerable periods of time." There were "cases of patients who had soiled themselves who were dependent on their relatives to clean them."
For those who weren't fortunate enough to be cleaned by their relatives, "the distress and suffering caused by this" was "almost unimaginable when imposed on often frail and elderly patients fully aware of how they were being robbed of their dignity."
When patients were washed, sometimes the bowls were shared. Other sanitation problems included the presence of blood, discarded needles and used dressings.
Though not included in the report, a media account told of four members of one family who died at the hospital within 18 months. One of them, an 80-year-old woman, died "hungry and dehydrated" and in "her own excrement" because of staff failures, according to the Daily Mail.
The problems at Mid-Stratfordshire hospital are not isolated cases. Britain's system is plagued with similar problems. Last year, the Guardian reported that up to 10,000 cancer patients were dying needlessly in the U.K. each year because their condition was diagnosed too late, according to research by the government's director of cancer services.
Also in 2009, the Times said the health secretary ordered a probe into "claims that patients are dying due to poor care in at least 27 hospitals around the country."
From filthy facilities to long waiting lists to the lack of modern treatment and diagnostic equipment, the British health care system is in grave need of reform. America's system needs changes too, but not the kind that plague the U.K. and which Democrats are pushing. Ignoring lessons from over there almost guarantees the same disorder here.
Topic: Coming To A Hospital Near You? (Read 1140 times)