Dr. Donald Berwick, Obama’s newly appointed head the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), says of Britain’s National Health Service (as reported in the Wall Street Journal, July 8. 2010):
“I am romantic about the National Health Service,” he told a London audience in 2008, referring to the British single-payer system. “I love it,” Dr. Berwick added, going on to call it “such a seductress” and “a global treasure.” He routinely points to the NHS as a health-care model for the U.S.
Great Moments in Socialized Medicine
(James Taranto, Best of the Web Today, in the July 19, 2010, edition of the Wall Street Journal)
"A cash crisis in the NHS"--that’s Britain’s National Health Service--"has left patients lying on the operating table before doctors realised vital equipment had not been ordered, according to a leaked report,” London’s Sunday Telegraph reports:
Women in labour have been forced to wait while epidural equipment was borrowed from other hospitals, while other patients have been denied chest drains and radiology supplies, according to doctors at South London Healthcare Trust.
Minutes of a meeting between medical staff and the trust’s chief executive say “cash flow” problems at the trust which has a £50 million deficit, mean vital equipment is regularly not ordered.
A separate letter sent to managers of the trust, one of the largest in the country, says consultants have been misled into carrying out operations when it was not safe to go ahead because of bed shortages.
Patients, however, have reason to be reassured. As former Enron adviser Paul Krugman notes, “In Britain, the government itself runs the hospitals and employs the doctors. We’ve all heard scare stories about how that works in practice; these stories are false.”
Even Krugman has not (so far as we know) defended the socialized health system of North Korea. But a spat has broken out between the U.N.’s World Health Organization and Amnesty International, a left-leaning human-rights group, over Pyongyang’s patient care, the Associated Press reports:
Amnesty’s report on Thursday described North Korea’s health care system in shambles, with doctors sometimes performing amputations without anesthesia and working by candlelight in hospitals lacking essential medicine, heat and power. It also raised questions about whether coverage is universal as it--and WHO--claimed, noting most interviewees said they or a family member had given doctors cigarettes, alcohol or money to receive medical care. And those without any of these reported that they could get no health assistance at all.
WHO’s Paul Garwood claims that Amnesty’s report is “not up to the U.N. agency’s scientific approach to evaluating health care”:
The issue is sensitive for WHO because its director-general, Margaret Chan, praised the communist country after a visit in April and described its health care as the “envy” of most developing nations. . . . Garwood and WHO spokeswoman Fadela Chaib insisted that Amnesty’s report was complementary to their boss’ observations. . . . Asked Friday what countries were envious of North Korea’s health, Chaib said she couldn’t name any.
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