Posted on 10/18/2008 3:58:31 PM PDT by B-Chan
I knew my mother Norma's 81st birthday would be poignant. She had been diagnosed with lung cancer six months earlier... and was not expected to survive the year.
But at least, I reasoned, she was being treated at the world-renowned Royal Marsden Hospital in West London. There she would not only receive the best possible treatment but be cared for by dedicated nurses accustomed to looking after the terminally ill...
But when I arrived on Horder Ward on the morning of my mother's birthday, she was distressed and disorientated. Instead of wearing the white linen pyjamas she had gone to bed in, she was wrapped in an NHS gown Gradually it emerged that she had woken up in the middle of the night in a pool of blood, terrified she was haemorrhaging. She had rung the bell next to her bed but there was no response.
Eventually a nurse turned up to discover my mother's cannula - a tube inserted into her vein and attached to a saline drip - had fallen out of her arm.
The nurse bustled around changing the sheets while my mother sat covered in blood, shivering beside the bed. When she asked for a blanket, the nurse told her to put on her flimsy cotton dressing gown, an offer she declined as she didn't want it covered in blood.
Finally she was dressed in a hospital gown, put back into bed and left alone until I arrived in the morning. 'Where are her pyjamas?' I asked the nurse. 'I don't know,' she shrugged.
[ ... ]
We're all familiar with the problems facing the NHS: the chronic shortage of nurses, the drain on funding, target-orientated managers, government edicts...
But there's one question that cannot so easily be dismissed: when did hospital nurses stop caring?
(Excerpt) Read more at dailymail.co.uk ...
Fascinating quote. However, nobody argues that the stifling bureacracy is a good thing. The fact is, so-called ‘socialised medicine’ isn’t neccessarily poor quality, just the same as not every private company is efficient and competent.
Those of us who have lived in the UK all our lives know that the NHS used to work and delivered quality care in an efficient manner free at the point of delivery, but thanks to slashes in infrastructure and misguided reforms, it is now a shadow of it’s former self. Even the NHS system we have now is better than the better, even in relative terms, to the system that existed before the NHS. There’s a good reason why there isn’t a single political party worth a damn in the UK that advocates dismantling the NHS, not even the Tories when under Thatcher, because we are all aware that it used to work, and that the principle is still sound when put properly into practice...
I’m so sorry to hear what happened to your grandmother. I’ve read articles about the problem of criminals working in nursing homes, and in many cases it’s not that the employer doesn’t do a background check, but that the worker is using a false identity, generally one stolen from a legitimate healthcare worker (sometimes a former co-worker), so employment history, etc, check out. This is one of the many reasons I advocate a national biometric ID system. We simply need a way to know who people really are, for voting, for immigration, for hiring healthcare workers, and many other things.
Another big obstacle to decent care for the elderly is the combination of massive regulation and out-of-control liability laws. Suppose a registered nurse practitioner or physician assistant wants to open a small nursing home facility in her own home, in order to be able to quit her outside job to care for one of her parents who now needs residential nursing care. By taking in a handful of other patients at low cost, with the help of a couple of hired workers who don’t live in, she could make the whole thing feasible financially, while providing the same sort of care for several strangers that she wants to provide for her own parent.
Well, first, to meet building regulations, she’ll need at least $500,000 or so of major changes to her home (changes she doesn’t want, and which will destroy the homey feeling, and which will cost nearly as much to undo a few years later, when she wants to close the business, and make the house a private home again). Rip out all the normal doors and put in steel fire doors. Push bar operated exit doors, sprinkler system, central fire alarm system, all hallways and doorways have to meet minimum width. And the kitchen, of course, will have to be completely replaced to meet the health department’s institutional food service regulations. The whole HVAC system is likely to need replacing too. And all the plumbing will have to meet special codes.
Somehow, it’s okay for elderly people to live in their own homes, or any rented home, without all this crap, but the minute someone provides residential nursing care for a fee, all the regulations kick in. Then there are a thousand more regulations after the building code is dealt with — special insurance policy, record-keeping requirements, regular inspections by various government agencies, and on and on. Try running a small home-based care facility like this without meeting all these requirements, and you’ll be sued into bankruptcy the first time a resident gets a hangnail or pinkeye, and happens to have a relative who sees a profitable lawsuit opportunity. So of course nobody does it.
I grew up living either in the same house or on the same farm (2 houses) with my grandparents and my life is so much richer because of it.
I plan to bring Mother to live with me when it becomes necessary. And I will not accept no for an answer.
Interesting idea. I’ve often wondered if there isn’t some potential for Indian reservations in the US to get into the private medical care business by ditching all the malpractice and regulatory crap. Seems to me they could be extremely competitive on both price and quality just by thumbing their nose and federal and state regulations. And it would do the Indian tribes worlds of good to start running major industries other than gambling and cigarette-selling.
The majority should not be able of direct the use of everybody's money. Let the majority run their own healthcare facilities, housing finance companies, etc the way they want to WITH THEIR OWN MONEY. Then let the various monorities run their own healthcare facilities, housing finance companies, etc, the way THEY want to, WITH THEIR OWN MONEY. The problem with the system of the majority voting on what to do with everybody's money, is that the majority with less money will invariably vote themselves access to the money of the minority with more money, and said majority's ideas about how to run things tend to be symptomatic of their difficulty in earning or saving money. They want to use the money earned and saved by the wealthier minority, to run things in the irrational and inefficient manner in which they've run their own unsuccessful lives.
While I abhor the notion of socialized medicine anywhere, it’s worth noting that New Zealand’s immigration policies (fortified by its ocean-surrounded geography) make a lot of things work there that don’t work in countries that won’t and/or can’t control their borders.
Ain’t socialism great?
This is what we have to look forward to under the Democrats.
I agree with you: because of the 50-state structure of the US, for example, it would be well-nigh impossible for your country to implement a socialized medicine model. It would be ruinously expensive even to try.
Aside from the abuse that would happen on a grand scale, the fact that it would probably be administered at a state level would make it difficult to keep consistent across the nation.
We have abuse from illegals in our system: mostly from the islands where the population is almost indigent. No medicine at home and no way to repay what they get from us. In that case it becomes an elaborate form of Foreign Aid: I believe it even gets accounted for in that manner.
In the US situation, you would be in the galling situation of providing free medical care to illegals so that they could give birth to their anchor babies.
I do not advocate socialized medicine for the United States: it wouldn’t work, and the necessary infrastructure to make it work would be ruinous.
I am taking issue with the notion, tho’, that socialized medicine is Socialism. It isn’t.
Socialized anything is socialism. There’s no reason the free market, families, churches, neighbors, private foundations for specific serious diseases, etc, can’t provide good medical care to everyone who deserves it.
We already have largely socialized medicine in the US. The bulk of medical care is provided under Medicare or Medicaid funding, plus a bevy of state programs. And very nearly all the rest is provided in facilities that are built around those programs (hewing tightly to a maze of regulations that are a prerequisite for receiving reimbursement under those programs), and to patients whose care is being paid for by insurance programs that are subject to such intense government regulation, that they might as well be government programs as far as cost-effectiveness, incentive to patients to take care of their own health, and incentive to healthcare providers to provide good care, are concerned. The elderly have basically no choice but to use the Medicare system, as they’ve been taxed for it all their lives, and thus haven’t been able to save their own money to pay for their own privately chosen care.
The physician training program is an absolute horror, abusing young doctors with health-damaging hours and pay at a fraction of real market value, under a “private” system which is authorized by the government as the sole route to becoming licensed to practice medicine in this country, and which assigns young doctors to a training program. Don’t like the program you’ve been assigned to, because the people running it break rules right and left and force you to give lousy care, and plus it’s a thousand miles away from your parents’ home where your mother is caring for your father who has advanced Alzheimer’s? Tough Sh!#. Your only option is to quit, and not practice medicine, and find some other way to pay off the average $250,000 student debt load of a medical school graduate. Funny how the concept of “freedom” is nowhere to be found in there, for the young doctors, or for the patients who would like be cared for by doctors who aren’t being forced to work 100 hours a week and stumble about the hospital in a sleep-deprived stupor.
And P.S., we already ARE “in the galling situation of providing free medical care to illegals so that they could give birth to their anchor babies”. Federal laws requires all hospitals that accept federal money (read Medicare, which all of are forced to pay into directly, and Medicaid, which all of us are forced fund through general tax revenues) to provide “emergency medical care” to anyone who shows up needing it. Illegal alien women in labor are very well-represented among the patients taking advantage of this evil law. There is not a single hospital emergency room in the nation operating outside this mandate.
> Socialized anything is socialism.
That’s nonsense-on-stilts! You have socialized Armed Forces, several socialized Law Enforcement Organizations and a socialized Postal Service. Are those “Socialism”, too?
There are a very few things that simply can’t be run on a fully private basis, and the armed forces certainly fall into that category (though a huge percentage of the money spent on our armed forces goes to private companies producing equipment and providing services on a competitive basis). Postal service is not so clear, though I believe international agreements governing cross-border postal service make it next to impossible to fully privatize postal service. However, the postal service in the US has been subjected to intense competition from private delivery companies, which now handle the great majority of package deliveries, and from thoroughly private Internet communications, which now handle the great majority of written correspondence.
Medical care can easily be run on a fully private basis, and has been in the past. Choosing to have government run something that could clearly be run privately is socialism. And the engine behind the “choice” is politicians using tax revenues confiscated from the more productive members of society to buy votes from the less productive members of society, who want to make other people pay for their medical care (and all sorts of other things) while they continue being unproductive.
Here in NZ our postal service is run on a competitive basis. Anyone can start up and operate a postal service here, if they want to. Many have tried, most of them suck. The government-owned NZ Post is by far and away the best — probably in the entire world.
What it comes down to is this: what services do the citizenry want the government to deliver as a matter of National Priority? Those services are “socialized”. All the rest is “privatized”.
It is possible to run a privatized Armed Forces successfully. Lots and lots of countries have used mercenary forces to defend them. The Vatican still uses the Swiss Guard: they were once a mercenary force. They are still “outsourced” from Switzerland.
It all comes down to national priorities. Just because a service is “socialized” doesn’t mean that it is necessarily a byproduct of “Socialism” as an ideology.
Ideology does not need to play any role in that decision.
That’s socialism. Things start out good and then people find out that no matter how hard they work or how much they care they cannot make a difference because government is in charge. They can’t make more money nor can they feel pride in their work. They can’t refuse a bad customer because that would be bigoted. People lose motivation and lose the work ethic.
Relax, I'm with you and witnessed the destruction. We can only hope that, with the help of the Holy Ghost, the growing ranks of solid young Catholic families will raise up a new generation of self-giving Priests, Brothers, and Sisters.
But why dont they “give a crap”? Mostly because they are overworked (because of staff shortages), stressed out (because they spend an increasing amount of their valuable time filling in forms rather than actually looking after people) and cynical (because the slightest error results in investigations that make Nurenburg look subtle).
Private health care still exists in the UK. In fact it is the norm with care for the elderly.
Private health care still exists in the UK. In fact it is the norm with care for the elderly.
I concur. In the final analysis, it’s the people in any job that count. It doesn’t matter whether it’s a hospital, a business or a government. If you have good people, all will be well (or at least tolerable). On the other hand, bad people, with no morals, no ethics and no compassion will screw up even the fairest and best of institutions.
Of course, that’s not to say that the way things are done isn’t important. I would define good ways as those that encourage more good people to do their job better, and bad ones that discourage the dedicated and put them down.
I dont think any of the democracies mentioned has compulsory socialised medicine.
However, I would point out that several democracies HAVE made housing a national priority - the USA being one of them - and look where that has led us to recently.
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