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Socialized medicine is hardly healthy.

Dumbing down care is not the way to ensure healthy people.

If you have no bucks and go to an emergency room in the states you WILL be seen based upon the severity of the wound/sickness. Chest pains? Straight in. Head cold? Few hours. Bleeding miscarriage? Right now.

Living in the UK, wife collapsed due to severe pain. Called ambulance. Arrived and took her to local hospital (Ipswitch). Was in deep, deep pain and no one, no one saw her for nearly an hour. I tried to get them to see her. Tried to explain she had suffered from cancer a few years back and thought it might have returned. . .but to no avail.

"Wait your turn in the que."

Finally, finally was seen by a doctor that could hardly speak english (Indian). They were trying to get a history from my wife while she was incoherent from the pain!

I could answer their questions but was pushed out and told to be quiet. Right, like my wife could answer their inane questions.

TV is the ONLY place you will see an American ER hold up someone is such pain. In the UK you can see it yourself.

Dolts.

Finally, after nearly three hours she was admitted.

I have no respect for socialized medicine.

None at all.

I have no respect for socialized medicine. None at all.

I will never, ever forget a story I heard reported on the CBC (of all places!) a few years ago. I guess it was too much even for them to ignore:

It was winter. An elderly couple somewhere in Canada was exiting a local hospital, after having visited a friend who was a patient there. Being a Canadian government operation, the hospital had not bothered to salt the sidewalk outside the door, and it had become icy. The man slipped and fell on the ice, breaking his hip.

Since they had left via the emergency room entrance, his wife ran back inside the door, expecting that she could get a couple of emergency room employees to run right back outside with a stretcher to retreive her husband and take him inside for treatment.

What a silly old woman she was for thinking that! It turns out that according to The Rules, only an ambulance was allowed to bring in patients for emergency room treatment. The doctors and nurses - whether out of sheer lack of concern for human life or out of fear of losing their jobs, I don't know - absolutely refused to step outside the door, not even to offer him a blanket while he waited. The wife literally had to call 911 and wait for an ambulance to show up and take her husband the five feet inside the emrgency room door (and fill out the proper paperwork, of course), before her husband received treatment.

That is socialized medicine in a nutshell.