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Excerpts from an Associated Press story about a government-run hospital in England:
At least 400, and maybe as many as 1,200 people died because of this hospital's incompetence. This took place over the course of 3 years. I'll go out on a limb here: Somebody should have noticed.
... Receptionists with no medical training were left to to assess patients arriving at the hospital's accident and emergency department ...
Julie Bailey, whose 86-year-old mother Bella died in the hospital in November 2007, said she and other family members slept in a chair at her bedside for eight weeks because they were so concerned about poor care.
"What we saw in those eight weeks will haunt us for the rest of our lives," said the 47-year-old. "We saw patients drinking out of flower vases they were so thirsty.
"There were patients wandering around the hospital and patients fighting. It was continuous through the night. Patients were screaming out in pain because you just could not get pain relief." ...
"We do apologise to all those people who have suffered from the mistakes that have been made in the Stafford Hospital," said Prime Minister Gordon Brown, questioned on the matter at his weekly grilling in the House of Commons.
It doesn't take an especially creative mind to picture what would happen if this story was about a profit-driven private hospital. Parliament members would quickly take to the torch and pitchfork and demand the heads of the greedy evil-doers sitting on the hospital's board. It's likely criminal charges would be filed against the hospital's management. The facility would be shut down and labeled a notorious house of torture.
Unfortunately for British residents (especially those who might, one day, get sick), these government big shots can blame nobody but the fella in the mirror. And all he has to do is say he's sorry.
2 comments:
The reason people feel the need to have a government-run health insurance program is that left to themselves, private insurance will first look at their quarterly earnings, and then secondly, consider a human life. They will deny claims without merit, even though their customer paid their premiums in good faith that insurance would pay when the time came to exercise a claim. I'd drop all my support for government, single-payer insurance if health insurance companies were legally bound to pay for the claims that are submitted. Too many people suffer physically and financially from having their claims denied unnecessarily. Why does medical bankruptcy only occur in the USA, when compared with all other first-world nations?
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/sickaroundtheworld
atrocious things happen in profit-driven private entities all the time. Wasn't this entire economic fallout created by profit-driven corporations, who if anything were allowed to do what they did because they weren't governed (regulated) enough? I don't think any politicians held guns to these investment bankers heads. I'm boggled to hear so many people admit that deregulation caused this mess, and then in nearly the same breath proclaim that governing them ISN'T the answer. counterintuitive doesn't even begin to describe it.
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