It’s a mystery why the United States’ Congress enacted ObamaCare socialized medicine despite evidence that government-controlled medicine endangers patients and is expensive.
Just look at the heartbreaking news from Britain’s horribly run “National Health Service.”
Roughly 10,000 patients per year in British hospitals are going malnourished, according to a recent report. In many cases, patients who can eat only pureed food are given solids instead. Or patients who have arthritis or broken wrists or who are extremely feeble are not given the help they need to eat, Britain’s Daily Mail newspaper reported.
Hundreds of deaths by malnutrition in British hospitals have been confirmed. Incredibly, two-thirds of nurses surveyed in the report acknowledged that hospitals do not make sure that patients who struggle to eat normally get the help they need to eat.
“Relatives routinely have to come in to [the] hospital to ensure their loved ones are being fed – while others bring in their own food to replace the inedible offerings of the Health Service,” the Daily Mail reported.
One grieving man whose mother was severely malnourished before her death in a hospital told the newspaper, “Her only fault apparently was that she was too old to be a matter of concern … . She was a bed blocker and her death cleared a space.”
That is one of the awful realities of bureaucratic, government-run, socialized medicine. It is a system to shun, not to imitate.