What We Can Expect from Socialized Medicine

Theodore Dalrymple is a medical doctor who is also a compassionate and insightful writer concerning the insane downward spiral a country experiences when it decides to take over medical care of the entire country, and his experience in the UK is echoed by a Labor [Dem in US parlance] minister in the Blair government who now can speak the truth:

Americans would do well to ponder a recent admission by a former British minister in the Blair government. On March 2, the Guardian reported that the ex-minister, now Lord Warner, said that while spending on Britain’s National Health Service had increased by 60 percent under the Labour government, its output had decreased by 4 percent. No doubt the spending of a Soviet-style organization like the NHS is more easily measurable than its output, but the former minister’s remark certainly accords with the experiences of many citizens, who see no dramatic improvement in the service as a result of such vastly increased outlays. On the contrary, while the service has taken on 400,000 new staff members—that is to say, one-fifth of all new jobs created in Britain during the period—continuity of medical care has been all but extinguished. Nobody now expects to see the same doctor on successive occasions, in the hospital or anywhere else.

That's just for starters and the hysterical leftists who pushed this abominable monstrosity through US Congress should all have to memorize this article before they are kicked out of office this November. Not that the Dems had read the original bill in the first place. What I liked the most about John Boehner's calling the slipshod sloppy lazy-ass Dems out from the rostrum was for not even reading the bill, which the illiterate CBC members were incapable of anyway. But the British example is instructive:

The ex-minister admitted that most of the extra money—which by now must equal a decent proportion of the total national debt—had been simply wasted. (The same might be said, of course, of the increased outlays put toward state education.) But his explanation for this state of affairs was superficial and self-exculpating, to say the least: he said that the NHS received more money than it knew what to do with because of managerial inexperience. “It was like giving a starving man foie gras and caviar,” he said.

Of course, wasteful spending is no surprise for someone who worked in the Federal government for over a decade, as I did in the State Department in several foreign countries, overseeing in a couple the military and direct aid projects in their sausage-making final stages. Waste and USG "assistance programs" are synonymous. But Dalrymple all but admits that for all practical purposes, the much derided "death panels" are a facet of the British NHS as a doctor follows government guidelines rather than his own best judgment in diagnosis and treatment problems:

As it happens, the NHS knew exactly what to do with the money: give it to its staff, new and old. British doctors, for example, are now the second-highest-paid in the world, though not necessarily the happiest. They have accepted the money on condition that they also accept—as quietly as mice—increasing government interference in their work. When you go to a family doctor in Britain, he is more likely to do what the government thinks he ought to do and will pay him a bonus for doing than what he thinks is right. This is sinister, even when what the government thinks is right happens to be right.

This is moral corruption at its most dangerous---the health of the tax-paying citizen is subordinated to NHS "guidelines" set by anonymous officials for political and budgetary reasons, not to cure the illness of the citizen. Dalrymple has worked in UK hospitals all over the country and he believes the meretricious dishonesty all leads to a complete breakdown of any rational or humane goals in the NHS health program, which has now become a cash cow bribing doctors to forget about their own training and diagnosis.

There is a possible explanation other than managerial inexperience for the waste, namely that the waste was intended and desired: indeed, that it was the principal object of the spending. Experience has long shown that further spending by state-monopoly suppliers of services (if services is quite the word I seek) benefits not the consumers but the providers. And they—ever more numerous—naturally vote for their own providers, the politicians. Thus the NHS has become an enormously expensive method of ballot-stuffing. Personally, I would rather have outright electoral fraud. It would be less expensive and slightly more honest.

Just before the last election, the chief executive of one of the hospitals in which I once worked was overheard saying, “My job is to make sure that the government is reelected.” (The government’s job, in turn, was to make sure that she remained chief executive.) She also explained that the hospital could expect no increase in its government funding, unlike other hospitals—because it was located in an area in which most people voted for the government anyway.

So now the USA can expect the national health care system to be taken over by cadres of SEIU thugs who enforce political correctness like the commissars of Stalin's USSR, minus of course the gulags which would be very un-British who prefer to muddle through their intermittent periods of national fecklessness. I would say that the latest of which periods [perhaps the Regency of George III was an earlier example in the social-moral sense] began with the election of Clement Atlee in 1945 by an nation exhausted by six years of heroic resistance to Nazi tyranny. But now the US might mimic the UK as a nation no longer willing to be a world power and ready to relax into slacker carelessness. In the UK, it was the ueber-Labor TUC's "I'm all right, Jack" socialism which rotted the intestinal fortitude of the UK until Margaret Thatcher gave it a brief reprieve from its downward slide into mediocre lassitude.

In the USA, it will be Andy Stern and the SEIU along with other union juggernauts which will guide Dem policy-making and reduce our foreign policy to retreat from terrorist threats and abandoning our true allies like Israel to flirt with the Castros and Chavezes and Putins and Ahmedinejads who reflect Obama's socialist statist autocratic goals more than the messy Knesset or the Honduras Supreme Court.

Like Kipling at the Diamond Jubilee in 1897, we should ask our poet laureate to compose an American "Recessional" from greatness and a unique way of life.