Yes the exception.
There are all of the rest of the Western industrialized nations in the world and Japan to pull examples from, yet virtually all of the examples of failures come from the UK. Why do you think that is? Is it because it is so representative that one need not look for examples elsewhere?

The exception?

If someone can show me how to link to here site from her I will do so.

You already did. If you put the URL into the text it automatically makes it a link or you can use the link button the same way you use the bquote button.

The NHS in the UK is a train wreck. Fortunately it is the exception rather than the rule for universal care systems.

October 15, 2007
Ther de-moralisation of health care
Daily Mail, 15 October 2007

How in God’s name have we come to this? In three hospitals in Kent, at least 90 patients have died from a superbug infection caused by filthy conditions with unwashed bedpans, staff ‘too busy’ to clean their hands and — most appalling of all — nurses telling patients with diarrhoea to ‘go in their beds’.

This unspeakable situation reveals not just callousness towards suffering and indifference to human dignity but a breakdown of some of our most basic civilised values.

Nor is this an isolated scandal. Last October, an internal memo warned the Government that virtually every NHS trust was reporting superbug infection. The health service, in other words, is institutionally polluted.

The Government’s response? To ignore this crisis, and then belatedly to bring forth Gordon Brown’s pathetic commitment to a sporadic hospital ‘deep clean’.

What has happened to the duty of care in our flagship public service? What has happened, indeed, to our sense of common humanity?

Two things have combined to cause this awful situation. The first is the Government’s Stalinist control of the NHS which directly conflicts with patient care. The Kent hospitals focused on meeting waiting time targets to the exclusion of just about everything else; and the NHS management’s byzantine structure ensures an almost total absence of accountability.

But that is far from the full explanation. Much more important is what has happened to the nursing profession, where there has simply been a collapse of that ethic of caring first promulgated by the inventor of modern nursing, Florence Nightingale.

Of course, it must be said that there are still many dedicated and caring nurses of whom Nightingale would be proud. But in general, her ethic has been all but destroyed.

Nursing is not a job but a vocation. That means it is governed by a sense of moral duty to the patient rather than by the self-interest of the nurse.

That sense of vocation lay at the heart of Nightingale’s vision. It was no accident that in her seminal Notes On Nursing, published in 1860, she wrote that ‘the greater part of nursing consists in preserving cleanliness’.

It was not just that cleanliness was essential for recovery and health. Keeping both hospital and patients clean meant the nurse needed to have the most elevated of motives to put the care and dignity of her patients first.

Accordingly, lowly functions such as washing, dressing and administering bedpans — where dignity was most fragile — were the functions that in nursing were invested with the highest possible significance. Simply, these were moral acts.

Accordingly, wrote Nightingale, if a nurse declined to do these kinds of things for her patient because she was so concerned about her own status, nursing was not her calling. ‘Women who wait for the housemaid to do this, or for the charwoman to do that, when their patients are suffering, have not the making of a nurse in them.’

Florence Nightingale belongs in the first rank of pioneering Victorian feminists. But the tragedy is that modern feminism has all but destroyed what she stood for.

In the 1980s, nursing underwent a revolution. Under the influence of feminist thinking, its leaders decided that nurses were treated like skivvies by doctors, who were mostly men. To achieve equality for women, therefore, nursing had to gain equal status with medicine. So nurse training was taken away from the hospitals and turned into an academic subject taught in universities.

This directly contradicted an explicit warning given by Florence Nightingale herself, that her ’sisters’ should steer clear of the ‘jargon’ about the ‘rights’ of women, ‘which urges women to do all that men do, including the medical and other professions, merely because men do it, and without regard to whether this is the best that women can do.’

That, however, was exactly what the nursing establishment proceeded to do. Since caring for patients was demeaning to women, it could no longer be the cardinal principle of nursing. Instead, the primary goal became to realise the potential of the nurse, to deliver equality with the male-dominated medical profession.

In her book The Project 2000 Nurse, Ann Bradshaw, a specialist in palliative care, described how this agenda removed caring, kindness, compassion and dedication from nurse training. Student nurses now studied courses such as sociology, gender studies, politics, psychology, microbiology and management. They were assessed for their communication, management, problem- solving and analytical skills. ‘Specific clinical nursing skills were not mentioned,’ she wrote.

In short, nursing ditched its core vocation to care.

I wouldn’t have believed this possible had I not been forced to witness how my own mother was treated in a London teaching hospital a few years ago. She suffered under a wretched double burden of multiple sclerosis and Parkinson’s disease. In that pitiable condition, which meant she could barely walk, she broke her hip and was admitted for surgery to a fracture ward.

If I hadn’t been on hand every day, she would have starved. After surgery, she was unable to move at all in her bed. Yet the nurses made no attempt to help her to eat; nor did they even deign to move her pillow to make her more comfortable. Yet when I protested, I was told by the senior nurse on duty the bare-faced lie that an hour previously my mother had been ’skipping round the ward’.

It was then that I realised that all the excuses about NHS failure being caused by lack of money were a lie. It was then that I understood that there was, instead, a lack of something infinitely more profound — conscience, kindness, a sense of duty to others — and that the image of the NHS as the embodiment of altruism was a grotesque illusion. If you were old and incapable, it was an encounter to be feared.

The memory of my mother’s terrible experience still makes me cry; and I weep also for all those poor souls who have died at the hands of the NHS in Kent, and all those other frail and powerless patients who are being treated so abominably in hospitals up and down the country.

What’s happened in our hospitals surely reflects a still wider social breakdown. Our society seems to have turned into a Darwinian nightmare in which the fittest prosper mightily while the old and weak are tossed aside as of no value.

That’s why we starve and dehydrate some elderly people to death. That’s why we turn a blind eye to the dreadful conditions in so many old people’s homes. And that’s why nurses become managers, and preen themselves as expert professionals in meetings and seminars and conferences and away- days while patients in their hospitals are left to die in their own filth.

And what about the Labour Party, for which the NHS is the ultimate symbol of its own superior social conscience? Are Labour MPs agitating about the filth in our hospitals and the deaths it is causing?

Dream on. Labour MPs are currently wholly occupied with inspecting their own navel and analysing who is up or down in the Gordon Brown/David Cameron circus. And as for the Health Secretary, while patients are dying as the direct result of the system over which he presides, he appears to think that the biggest threat to the future of the very planet is that people are too fat.

Our NHS is now the symbol of a society that has lost its moral compass along with its heart and soul.

http://www.melaniephillips.com/articles-new/?p=542

Well, sure. It's Steve favorite argument form. But my point is even if there are wait lists lasting years and people writhe in horrible pain waiting for doctors to come see them, it would still be a step up from people who die because they never even have that chance. Worse, there's children - children! - who basically miss out on the crucial first 5 years of - if nothing else - brain development because they don't get adequate nutrition and care. Something that severely impacts them negatively for the rest of their life.

But, in Steve's World (tm), there's a hierarchy of need which seems much different from the way my mother taught me.

Commie that she is. (actually, she's a hard core christian conservative, but that's another story)

But, hey, we're better because Steve doesn't have to wait as long.

According to his post he has to wait as long or longer than in a typical universal care system.
Dave's experiences in Chi indicate the same.
The wait list argument is a canard.

No Andy, it is that bureaucracies tend to muck things up, and health care has lots of bureaucracy. Adding the government to the mix doesn't strike me as the right strategy to simplifying/reducing bureaucratic involvement.

Still no answers as to how to do this?
Health care in the West will have layers of bureaucracy whether government is directly involved or not. It is simply too large an undertaking not to.
I have seen no evidence that adding more government provided care to the mix will appreciably increase the bureaucracy involved for any individual in the system. I seriously doubt that it would. Do you have any real evidence that per capita health care bureaucracy will increase with increased government involvement? (Gammon's hypothesis does not count as real evidence.)

Having a person sit at home in pain and being miserable isn't perceived as a cost by government run systems like in England, Canada, etc.

Again, nothing behind the etc but the implication that this is standard and that wait times in the UK are standard for universal systems. You must know that this is misleading.
Canada's wait list issues are generally limited to a few specific procedures and are more problematic in rural areas. The US has considerable issues in medically serving its rural areas as well.

And guess what, the French government actually indicated that it should consider more market based reforms to their system.

Do you think it would be a legitimate for a Frenchman to point to the fact that the US is considering more government involvement in health care as an argument counter to market based changes to their health care system?
As far as the looming health care crisis in France is concerned, their projected health care costs in 2010 (with the 29B shortfall) are still about 2/3s of our per capita costs in 2006. Their financing problem is simply nowhere near as large as ours and their growth in costs is less.

Sorry "managed care" is what you'll get with a government program and more-so. For example, in England you have mandatory waiting times before you can see a doctor.

Again with the UK canard?
Waiting times are not administratively reported in the US so there is no real basis for comparison, but anecdotally wait times in the US are similar to those in Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Japan, Luxembourg, and Switzerland. Though they are slightly less than in Denmark, Netherlands, Norway, and Spain. (and considerably less than in the UK or Finland)

Let me see. Medicare is facing a huge projected shortfall in the the trillions of dollars. So your solution is to expand Medicare. Brilliant.

That Medicare is underfunded is not a real argument about its efficiency or efficacy.
BTW Bush proposed to cut funding this year. How do you think that effects the projected shortfall?

PS Steve, hope your wife is doing better.

My GOD! Imagine that! On vacation. During August! In the EU! Who would have thought? Just the entire fricking continent goes on vacation during that month. And the implication is? What? Socialism leads to vacations which leads to? It was a completely and totally unpredicted event that overwhelmed their systems.

I doubt we in the USA would have done any better. And I'm sure that our response to Katrina would support this. Oh wait! That's the government, and as we all know, anarcho capitalists believe the government can't do anything and so Katrina disaster was just what one would expect.

Except there is no anarcho capitalist mechanism for dealing with large scale disasters other than "let 'em die, god will sort them out", which will inevitably decrease the population to the size where Grover Norquist can strangle them all in the bathtub - and then there'll be no more problem.

Man, I thought I'd seen you scrape the bottom of the barrel with the previous issue wrt "waiting" vs. people in this country dying. But this is somehow even more sleezy, using a natural disaster which overwelms a system as proof that their health care system is worse than ours...

I'll just reiterate it so you'll get the point:

Every year, 18,000 people die in the US because of inadequate health insurance. That's 8K more than died in France in this incident, and unlike the incident in France, it happens EVERY YEAR.

But, hey, we're better because Steve doesn't have to wait as long.

Geebus.

Sorry "managed care" is what you'll get with a government program and more-so. For example, in England you have mandatory waiting times before you can see a doctor. Basically a super-charged version of "wait in the waiting room for 3 hours", but with the slight benefit that you can wait at home...possibly in pain, reduced mobility, etc.

Yea, what's a few million kids going without health insurance compared to your inconvenience. And let's forget about those 18,000 deaths every year due to inadequate health insurance.

I'm sure each and every one said a silent prayer of thanks each day that they weren't in such a country with such shitty health care. I mean, much better to die or grow up without proper nutrition and care than have Steve wait at home for health care.

Death and permanent assignment to the underclass because you didn't have the right vitamins during the crucial first five years of life is nothing compared to that.

It isn't about blaming socialized medicine for an HMOs failing, its realzing that socialized medicine controls costs through the same means.

But Medicare has many fewer layers of profit taking and administration.

You have to be able to show that having private insurers is so much more efficient than Medicare, that even with their profits and extra layers of administration, their price-performance is as good as Medicare. All real world evidence is to the contrary.

Wow, because your private HMO is doing such a bang up job?

Your ideology is overwhelming rationality.

No Andy, it is that bureaucracies tend to muck things up, and health care has lots of bureaucracy. Adding the government to the mix doesn't strike me as the right strategy to simplifying/reducing bureaucratic involvement.

Also see this response by Mr. Biggs,

It isn't about blaming socialized medicine for an HMOs failing, its realzing that socialized medicine controls costs through the same means.

Having a person sit at home in pain and being miserable isn't perceived as a cost by government run systems like in England, Canada, etc. Nor is it seen as a cost by those advocating such systems.

France is an excellent counter example to the absurdity of the two-tiered American system of a long wait or an emergency room. They have a system of on-call physicians who will come to your home at any time of day or night for a very reasonable fee. This system reduces overall costs by limiting expensive ER visits, and improves overall health by actually treating people quickly.

Well, now we know you aren't that well informed. France has a two tier system with public and private insurance. And guess what, the French government actually indicated that it should consider more market based reforms to their system. Of course, that lead to protests, but hey don't let stuff like this get in the way of your views.

Hal,

Sorry "managed care" is what you'll get with a government program and more-so. For example, in England you have mandatory waiting times before you can see a doctor. Basically a super-charged version of "wait in the waiting room for 3 hours", but with the slight benefit that you can wait at home...possibly in pain, reduced mobility, etc.

Ken,

Let me see. Medicare is facing a huge projected shortfall in the the trillions of dollars. So your solution is to expand Medicare. Brilliant.

Michael,

When you go to urgent care oddly enough you find yourself in the same waiting room, seeing the same doctors, etc. as when you go to family care.

Christopher,

First of all, jaw pain 3 days after being rear-ended? LOL!

Actually, my wife was already suffering from TMJ, a problem related to grinding one's teeth during sleep. It affects, AFAIK, the jaw and how it works. According to the doctor, a collision from the rear can exacerbate the problem.

Oh, and we aren't planning on suing anyone.

Hal,

Oh, and heat waves aren't caused by socialism.

Geebus.

Of course not, but the fact that their health systems couldn't deal with the situation is problematic. My understanding was that a part of the problem was that many doctors were on vacation during the heat wave.

Overall, this problem is going to get worse as we find ourselves with fewer doctors. Soon the baby boomers will be retiring, and when that happens lots of currently practicing doctors will retire as well. And since the number of doctors isn't determined by the market system, but instead by government there will likely be a problem. And since people are reluctant to allocate medical resources via price, they'll use other mechanisms...like increasing waiting times. You'll either give up and go home and live with the problem, you'll die if it is serious enough, and some will get treated.

I am going to nominate your last post for craziest wingnuttery EVAR!!!one!1!!1 (spoof category) in the next webbie awards.

Andy of course the pro stolen identity pro rape and murder (as everyone pro illegals is since they think crime is okay) accuses me of being anti immigrant. NO WORTHLESS SLIMEBALL I am anti illegal.

AS far as the Nazis being socialist they were.

The unions were once good but now they are not worth anything.

GET RID OF THE SOCIALISTS THEY HATE AMERICA.

Sorry I want to be awarded for my hard work and want it to matter whether I sit on my butt my life or work hard to achieve things.

And the worthless business owner here who wants the government to pay for healthcare for his workers.

PRobably rapes and beats employees daily.

Cities near the Canadian border have patients all the time who have to wait in Canada for life saving treatment.

Jeebus.

Beautiful.