Dying for Socialised Medicine

A lot of Brits I talk to can’t understand why Americans don’t flock to Hillary Clinton because of her favourable views about socialised medicine. After all, there’s nothing Brits are more proud of than the NHS.

Sure Britain has some of the worst survival rates for cancer in the Western world, but no one has to worry about paying for it. But as they say, you get what you pay for.

Socialised medicine in a country divided up into Primary Care Trusts (PCT) equals the post code lottery. In other words, each trust decides how it’s going to divide up it’s little slice of the health care funding pie. Each local board of bureaucrats prioritises which patients deserve to live and which ones don’t. In a rationed system, a few people get paid a lot of money to play Lifeboat every day.

When it comes to cancer, I’ve drawn one of the short straws. To preserve my anonymity, I won’t say exactly how much is spent per cancer patient per year here. I will tell you that the top spending PCT spends three times as much as the lowest. I could say that my PCT spends less that £10,000 per patient per year, but out of 159 PCTs, only 39 spend more. No, my PCT is comfortably in four figures and comfortably in the bottom 10%.

I suppose I can’t afford to stop eating my fruit and veg and grains. You can’t afford to elect Hillary.

Meeting Targets

When it comes passing on things from the MSM, I put the Daily Mail, despite its more conservative political bent, near the bottom of credibility. However, as the following story is based on a phone interview and will be followed up with a full report on Tonight with Trevor McDonald it is credible enough for me.

I have written in the past about the Government’s policy of stealing babies. One Northumberland woman was told that she would be allowed ten minutes with her baby after birth before it would be taken away and put in foster care. She first fled to Birmingham, since foster care is handled by local authorities. However, the bureaucratic red tape meant that there was no way she could be sure that she and her baby would be safe.

As a result she has had to flee to Europe, hiding from the agents of her own government.  She is not a criminal. She just wants to keep her baby.

Fran Lyon’s case is by no means unique.  The Independent on Sunday highlighted the case of Pauline Goodwin. Goodwin’s case was not even unique on her street. “There were three other mothers in the square where I lived who all had their children taken away within a matter of months,” she says. “We happened to live by some malicious people, who thought it was fun to ring the social services and see the reaction. It should never have been allowed to happen.”

“Pauline is the tip of the iceberg,” says Birmingham Yardley Liberal Democrat MP John Hemming. “Statistics suggest there are about 1,000 cases in this country where children have been wrongfully adopted. It’s possibly even more than that. I know of a number of cases where all sorts of intimidation is used to discourage people from fighting back.”

Even the liberal MSM is openly talking about how the central government is increasingly using Stalinist tactics to control the population.  This is clearly filtering down to the local level as social workers seek to meet the targets set for them in meeting adoption quotas.

Nasty

I don’t care what you think about the conflict in Iraq and the part played by US or British forces, some things are just beyond the pale of acceptable behaviour. In the US there are people like Fred Phelps and their protests at funerals. But at least they have a cause, however repulsive and misguided.

In the UK, who needs a cause? It is just enough to be nasty.

From the Daily Telegraph:

Injured soldiers who lost their limbs fighting for their country have been driven from a swimming pool training session by jeering members of the public.

Fiascos

In my blogging hiatus, the Government has managed to screw things up in monumental ways. They’ve realised that the money they loaned Northern Rock bank to bail it out will almost certainly never come back. This means that everyone in the UK has paid £900 each to keep it afloat long enough for another company to come in a take it and the taxpayer money.

Then they lost the records of 25,000,000 people – half the UK population. Not just any records. Bank records and everything needed for identity theft. And we I say lost, I don’t mean accidentally erased. I mean put them all on CDs and sent them 2nd class in the post and they got lost. This is the same government that is going to make everyone have ID cards and promises, “Your information is safe with us.”

Of course it isn’t just the loss of the data. On top of that the Government first delayed saying anything, and when they did, they were economical with the truth. They knew the data was missing three weeks before they finally decided to tell anyone. Then they blamed it on a junior civil servant. Email evidence now shows that senior officials authorised the transfer of the imformation on the discs. It has also come to light that the Government didn’t want to spend a small amount to strip the sensitive information before sending it.

Gordon Brown was Chancellor for 10 years and took credit for much of the positive economic climate. Now as Prime Minster, things were already starting to head downhill before the fiascos of incompetence started. Had he called a snap election, he had a good chance of winning. Now that the election has been delayed for a couple of years, it could be a very bumpy ride, but maybe the end is in sight.