Sunday, March 19, 2006

So You Love "Free" Medical Care

The debate about medical care in Canada has been raging for years and shows no sign of letting up. The National socialist Party love the single tier system while at the other end Libertarians would have it scrapped. I go for scraping the whole thing but I am not so naive as to believe it is possible under current conditions. What I find most distressing is the adamant desire to stifle freedom of choice and in actual fact seeking private care is illegal in most places. There is nothing, absolutely nothing, that the government runs that is efficient. The total control of the medical system is a social and financial disaster and getting worse. The horror stories abound and to demonstrate just how bad it will get we only have to look to England who have had the National Health Service for much much longer than we have.
There is a Dr. John Crippen who keeps a diary and you will find it hard to believe what passes as the practice of medicine in Jolly old England these days. To give you a taste, if you can stomach it:

"At the end of the surgery, a deputation of district nurses arrive to discuss an elderly paraplegic patient. He was admitted to hospital three weeks ago with chest pain. The pain turned out not to be cardiac. The nursing care whilst he was in hospital was appalling. He was on Dixon ward. The hoist was not working so they could not get him out of bed as they should. He was transferred to a side room. This is more private that the general ward, but so private that even the nurses do not go in there. He was once left on the commode for four hours as they forgot about him.
He went in with some sacral redness, but came out with a Grade IV pressure sore around his sacrum. The nurses are so disgusted, they have photographed it.


Grade IV Sacral Bed Sore
(Wikipedia classification here)

The hospital sent him home. They sent him home on a Friday evening. Home in a worse state that he went in. They sent him home to his eighty year old wife with one of the worst pressure sores I have seen in years. He has now developed intractable diarrhoea, and it coats the pressure sore. He needs round the clock intensive nursing therapy, including being turned regularly. We cannot do this at home. They cannot do it in hospital it seems either. The nurses are too busy eating pizza or pretending to be doctors."

The above is only the tip of the iceberg and Dr. Crippen is only one man and his diary is damming of a nationalized program that is totally corrupt. The contempt for patients is criminal and the overwhelming bureaucratic red tape nightmare insures that the problem will only get worse. If you think it can't happen here you can only have an IQ not much larger than your waist size.

Read D. Crippen's journal yourself and weep.

I nods to Silent Running.

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