Friday
(0)The great canard of the collectivists holds that a free-market in healthcare will assuredly result in healthcare providers hungrily pursuing maximum profits while abandoning the poor, the elderly and the vulnerable to a wretched and untreated fate.
So often and so passionately has this big lie been repeated that it is now accepted by most people in this country as an incontrovertibe truth. Nationalised healthcare, they say, puts people's needs at the top of the agenda where there is no room for ugly money-grubbing.
Only they forgot about ugly bed-grubbing:
A nurse has been jailed for five years for trying to kill two elderly patients at a Cheshire hospital.Barbara Salisbury, 47, was found guilty of trying to kill them to free up more beds at Leighton Hospital, in Crewe.
Rationed resources require desperate measures. In fact, and given the governmental obsession with reducing waiting times for hospital treatment, I am a little surprised that the Department of Health has not pinned a medal on this woman.
When she finally emerges from her time in stir, Ms Salisbury may well find herself being offered a job back in the NHS as a senior consultant.
The true ugliness of a rationing system is how it creates evil. It's not that NHS folks are bad, it's that by the nature of the game, those most in need hog the resources, and become "burdens". It must be hard for staff to see healthy patients tuned away because Mrs Smith, ninety-whatsit, wheezing and drooling, stubbornly refuses to face the inevitable. That could easily turn to hate.
Posted by Julian Morrison at June 19, 2004 02:10 AM
I'm not sure so many people accept the canard hook, line and sinker. It's just that it seems comforting to too many to know that everybody else gets the same shitty service as they do. They want better healthcare, as long as their neighbor's is not better than theirs.
As with incomes, poverty and many other things, absolute levels matter a lot less than relative uniformity, or the lack thereof. And this collective reality distortion field is simply a goldmine for statist politicians and pundits of all colors and persuasions. Pandering to it is, most of the time, incredibly easier and more rewarding than going against it. As they say in Africa : "Swimming against the current makes the crocodile laugh..."
Posted by Sylvain Galineau at June 19, 2004 06:17 PM
Unfortunately the more faults you pick with the NHS the more funding people think it needs, rather than less.
Incidentally David - and totally off-topic - I'm sure it was you I saw on in an old TV clip tonight playing a trick on Dale Winton. You were looking good!
Posted by Tim Sturm at June 20, 2004 01:13 AM
I agree Tim. Whenever the socialists see a story like this, they never draw the conclusion that nationalised healthcare is inherently wrong. Instead they decide that more money needs to be thrown at the problem in the form of raised taxes.
Posted by Paul at June 21, 2004 09:53 PM
