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Tuesday, April 16, 2019

A Year Ago, I Had a Student Who Was a Graduate of Evergreen State College

That should tell you enough right there.  He dropped the class and told the department chair that I was politicizing history.  I had referred to the struggle between elites and the masses in American history.  When he challenged what I considered elite ideas, I mentioned the National Health Service in Britain and gun control.  He engaged in a vigorous defense of the NHS, which he claimed to have extensively studied.  I mentioned that British papers have reported on thousands of patients starved to death in NHS hospitals.  Because he didn't believe it, I brought the articles, which quoted government officials admitting it.  He dropped the class shortly afterwards.  4/15/19 [U.K.] Mirror (a tabloid, what the masses read):

Man with Down's Syndrome's 'cruel and horrific' death after 19 days without food

Giuseppe 'Joe' Ulleri wasted away at Manchester Royal Infirmary after the 'failure in his overall care'
2/2/19 Mirror:
Hospital patients die from starvation and thirst because nurses are over-stretched

But this week it was revealed that three patients a day are dying from starvation or thirst or choking on NHS wards. 
1/9/17 [U.K.] Independent:

Two patients die from starvation or thirst each day in UK hospitals and care homes, say statistics


7 comments:

  1. Mirror. Extreme left wing tabloid. If you have lost the Mirror...

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  2. For many years I lived in Australia, which many reckon has superior health care, much like the NHS of England. Australia's system is mostly public, a universal health care, but also allows private practice. Once I went to attend a meeting; it was held in a room at Fremantle Hospital, a large modern hospital near Perth in Western Australia.

    I had entered the hospital at the opposite side, so walked through to get to the room of my meeting. I went through large corridors, lined with patients in mobile beds on each side; I saw wards which were dark & empty, and wondered why the patients were in the corridors instead of the wards, and thought it must be some maintenance issue, or perhaps renovation.

    When I got to my meeting (which had nothing to do with health care, that's just where it was held) I discovered that the state government had cut back on funding for the hospital, so it literally could not afford to treat patients in the wards. So the corridors had to do: men, women, children all lining the corridors, where they were tended by doctors and nurses. They had no privacy at all, and God only knows about communicable diseases.

    The thought of that still horrifies me.

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  3. Let me start out by saying I am opposed to NHS, Medicare For All, Single Payer and any other Socialist health care schemes and the idea that healthcare is a right that should be provided by the government.

    However, with all that said I would dispute that this case proves that NHS is any worse than health insurance or any other such system in this specific case. We see such inexcusable treatment from those who are on insurance as well for elderly, disabled and the like. Or is there evidence you can provide this is more common in a system like that? Yes I know that NHS has coverage limits and will not treat certain kinds of patients under their scheme so it definitely has limits.

    No question that old and disabled patients under socialist health care schemes as well as people with poor quality insurance (or crappy insurers) are at a disadvantage either way. But then even if they have great insurance no guarantees. Disabled, elderly, and anyone else that can't speak for themselves are often screwed regardless of the system.

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  4. Unknown: In what hospital in America will anyone starve to death? Insurance always pays for hospital "food." To be fair, St. Al's in Boise has pretty decent meals. Even recovering from a heart attack, I was allowed some decent pizza.

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    1. I think the hospitals in question here would be called nursing homes in the States and not like the hospital you describe. Nursing homes in the US are notorious for neglect as well. It does make one assume the victims had no family visiting or checking on their welfare. Not sure how often such a patient starved here, but malnutrition and weight loss is common here as well.

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  5. Actually, the articles identify both hospitals and nursing homes as places where these deaths are happening. Yes, family or friends should notice these problems. But no hospital should ever allow a patent to die of starvation or thirst. That is barbarism.

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  6. Looking at both of those articles it still looks like when they say Hospital it sounds like these are in fact long term care (till end of life) nursing homes and not short term surgery or illness recovery facilities. It also appears that some of these places in the UK must have nursing care wards in their regular hospitals as well.

    Of course regardless of the situation this should never happen, but this still is mostly a nursing care (care of elderly and disabled people) problem. That is patients that are never going back to independent living.

    Now if we talked about in the UK they don't have enough resources to care for everyone at the same level (an acceptable level anyways) which is the unpleasant reality of socialist health care schemes that the leftists don't want to hear about. In those countries those wealthy enough buy supplemental insurance or pay to go to better places in some cases or even travel out of country for care.

    Cheers!

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