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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.

Since Ed and I have each written about the latest round of Obamacare-exacerbated premium hikes, let’s check in on Britain’s single-payer system, which many American liberals fetishize: An official inquiry into failings at [Stafford] hospital, where between 400 and 1,200 patients died needlessly due to a catalogue of failings and appalling standards of care, is due to be published later this month. The report is expected to blame managers who cut costs and reduced staffing levels in an attempt to hit "efficiency" targets and win foundation status. Before taking control of the health service, Sir David ran the health authority...

FULL TITLE: 60,000 patients put on death pathway without being told but minister still says controversial end-of-life plan is 'fantastic' Up to 60,000 patients die on the Liverpool Care Pathway each year without giving their consent, shocking figures revealed yesterday. A third of families are also kept in the dark when doctors withdraw lifesaving treatment from loved ones. Despite the revelations, Jeremy Hunt last night claimed the pathway was a ‘fantastic step forward’. Outcry: Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt provoked outrage by saying the death pathway was a 'fantastic step forward' In comments that appeared to prejudge an official inquiry into...

That´s not to say it´s excusable, just that the appalling neglect of 38 patients at the Alexandra Hospital in Redditch is the logical result of the NHS´s untenable management structure. Imagine if everything at Tesco´s was free but rationed, and subject to delivery delays of several months. Then throw in the fact that there are no other free alternatives. You would have a nightmare on your hands--huge queues, attracted by the free goods, then further stretched by the long delays. Imagine how the staff would then behave--harrassed by the limitless demand of customers, but also in a tyrannical position of

Ann Clwyd broke down as she spoke about the final moments of Owen Roberts, who contracted pneumonia after being admitted.[Snip] She said her husband was squashed against the side of his bed, his lips dry, and cold from a fan that had been turned on for a patient in an adjacent bay. A light had been flicked on in the four-bed ward and someone shouted out “anybody for breakfast?” just moments before he died., Ms Clwyd said. She painted a picture of nurses who treated her husband with “coldness, resentment, indifference and even contempt"

Much like the Greek debt crisis offered a glimpse of that fiscal day-of-reckoning 'Obama bucks' America is soon to face, the UK's  ever-ailing National Health Service -a 60-year-old system of socialized medicine known as the NHS- provides Americans a useful preview of all the expensive, unnecessary disasters our own Obamacare will soon be bringing on this side of the pond. And the prognosis?  Hope you're sitting down... The Guardian (UK): Senior doctors warned that the findings reflected their increasingly frantic efforts to find beds for the growing number of emergency admissions and that repeated breaches of the 85% (capacity) limit meant...

I’m not easily grossed out or nauseated. Heck, I’m on email lists for a half-dozen softball teams and you can only imagine the strange/filthy/nasty things that guys send to each other. But I read a story about the death panels in the United Kingdom that left me discombobulated. I can’t even begin to describe how I feel.Here’s the intro of a disturbing report in the Daily Mail.Sick children are being discharged from NHS hospitals to die at home or in hospices on controversial ‘death pathways’. Until now, end of life regime the Liverpool Care Pathway was thought to have involved...

Each year around 130,000 patients are placed on the Lierpool Care Pathway, which can involve the withdrawal of drugs, fluids and food, and the administration of powerful pain relief. A national audit by the Marie Curie Palliative Care Institute Liverpool and the Royal College of Physicians ... demonstrated that in total, around 57,000 patients a year are dying in NHS hospitals without being told that efforts to keep them alive have been stopped. It also reveals that thousands of dying patients have been left to suffer in pain, with no attempt to keep them comfortable while drugs were administered....

Patients experience “coldness, resentment, indifference" and "even contempt” in some hospitals, the Health Secretary has claimed in a hard-hitting speech about NHS care. In the worse cases staff have overseen “a kind of normalisation of cruelty”, Jeremy Hunt told an audience of health professionals at The King’s Fund, a London-based think-tank. Managers were so “buried in spreadsheets” that they had become “blind” to the fact that patients were not being treated with dignity or respect, he said. Poor care had become “perhaps the biggest problem of all facing the NHS”, Mr Hunt claimed in his strongest speech yet on the...