NEW – British Govt Hospital Causes “Unimaginable Suffering”: Up to 1,200 needless deaths, patients abused, staff bullied to meet targets… yet a secret inquiry into failing hospital says no one’s to blame.

NEW – British National Health Service late cancer diagnosis kills 10,000 a year – LINK.

Real Clear Politics:

By Deroy Murdock

Imagine that your two best friends are British and Canadian tobacco addicts. The Brit battles lung cancer. The Canadian endures emphysema and wheezes as he walks around with clanging oxygen canisters. You probably would not think: “Maybe I should pick up smoking.”

The fact that America is even considering government medicine is equally wacky. The state guides health care for our two closest allies: Great Britain and Canada. Like us, these are prosperous, industrial, Anglophone democracies. Nevertheless, compared to America, they suffer higher death rates for diseases, their patients experience severe pain, and they ration medical services.

Look what you’re missing in the U.K.:

* Breast cancer kills 25 percent of its American victims. In Great Britain, the Vatican of single-payer medicine, breast cancer extinguishes 46 percent of its targets.

* Prostate cancer is fatal to 19 percent of its American patients. The National Center for Policy Analysis reports that it kills 57 percent of Britons it strikes.

* Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development data show that the U.K.’s 2005 heart-attack fatality rate was 19.5 percent higher than America’s. This may correspond to angioplasties, which were only 21.3 percent as common there as here.

* The U.K.’s National Institute of Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) just announced plans to cut its 60,000 annual steroid injections for severe back-pain sufferers to just 3,000. This should save the government 33 million pounds (about $55 million). “The consequences of the NICE decision will be devastating for thousands of patients,” Dr. Jonathan Richardson of Bradford Hospitals Trust told London’s Daily Telegraph. “It will mean more people on opiates, which are addictive, and kill 2,000 a year. It will mean more people having spinal surgery, which is incredibly risky, and has a 50 per cent failure rate.”

* “Seriously ill patients are being kept in ambulances outside hospitals for hours so NHS trusts do not miss Government targets,” Daniel Martin wrote last year in London’s Daily Mail. “Thousands of people a year are having to wait outside accident and emergency departments because trusts will not let them in until they can treat them within four hours, in line with a Labour [party] pledge. The hold-ups mean ambulances are not available to answer fresh 911 calls. Doctors warned last night that the practice of ‘patient-stacking’ was putting patients’ health at risk.”

Things don’t look much better up north, under Canadian socialized medicine.

* Canada has one-third fewer doctors per capita than the OECD average. “The doctor shortage is a direct result of government rationing, since provinces intervened to restrict class sizes in major Canadian medical schools in the 1990s,” Dr. David Gratzer, a Canadian physician and Manhattan Institute scholar, told the U.S. House Ways & Means Committee on June 24. Some towns address the doctor dearth with lotteries in which citizens compete for rare medical appointments.

* “In 2008, the average Canadian waited 17.3 weeks from the time his general practitioner referred him to a specialist until he actually received treatment,” Pacific Research Institute president Sally Pipes, a Canadian native, wrote in the July 2 Investor’s Business Daily. “That’s 86 percent longer than the wait in 1993, when the [Fraser] Institute first started quantifying the problem.”

* Such sloth includes a median 9.7-week wait for an MRI exam, 31.7 weeks to see a neurosurgeon, and 36.7 weeks – nearly nine months – to visit an orthopedic surgeon.

* Thus, Canadian supreme court justice Marie Deschamps wrote in her 2005 majority opinion in Chaoulli v. Quebec, “This case shows that delays in the public health care system are widespread, and that, in some cases, patients die as a result of waiting lists for public health care.”

Obamacare proponents might argue that their health reforms are neither British nor Canadian, but just modest adjustments to America’s system. This is false. The public option – for which Democrats lust – would fuel an elephantine $1.5 trillion overhaul of this life-and-death industry. Having Uncle Sam in the room while negotiating drug prices and hospital reimbursement rates will be like sitting beside Warren Buffett at an art auction. Guess who goes home with the goodies?

A public option is just the opening bid for eventual nationalization of American medicine. As House Banking Committee chairman Barney Frank (D., Mass.) told SinglepayerAction.Org on July 27: “The best way we’re going to get single payer, the only way, is to have a public option to demonstrate its strength and its power.”

Barack Obama seconds that emotion.

“I don’t think we’re going to be able to eliminate employer coverage immediately,” Obama told a March 24, 2007 Service Employees International Union health-care forum. “There’s going to be potentially some transition process. I can envision [single payer] a decade out or 15 years out or 20 years out.” As he told the AFL-CIO in 2003: “I happen to be a proponent of single-payer, universal health-care coverage. . . . That’s what I’d like to see.”

And why a public option just for medicine? Wouldn’t government clothing stores be best suited to furnish the garments Americans need to survive each winter? And why not a public option for restaurants? Shouldn’t Americans have universal access to fine dining?

All kidding aside, government medicine has proved an excruciating disaster in the U.K. and Canada. Our allies’ experiences with this dreadful idea should horrify rather than inspire everyday Americans, not to mention seemingly blind Democratic politicians.

Deroy Murdock is a columnist with the Scripps Howard News Service and a media fellow with the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace at Stanford University.

UPDATE: Refuting WHO report nonsense.

This post has gone viral on the internet and is posted on thousands of message board around the world and the most common response I have seen are some profoundly ignorant postings from leftists screaming that the WHO Report ranks the United States number 37th in care world wide, therefore we must stink. If said leftists had taken the time to actually read the report they would see that the WHO ranks the United States number one in patient responsiveness and care, but putting the United States as number one offends the WHO’s socialist sensibilities, so they had to find a way to lower America’s ranking. They were at least nice enough in the report to admit what they were doing and how they did it.

The WHO figures into the ranking weather or not the country in question has socialized health care, that means that if health care dollars come from the private sector, charities or the consumer the WHO lowers the ranking. WHO also skews the mortality rates by including people who die from crime and more importantly WAR.

When you look at the breakdown the United States according to WHO  is number ONE in patient responsiveness and care – http://www.photius.com/rankings/world_health_systems.html

The WHO divides the report into sections – Here is the section on patient responsiveness and level of care – the United States is ranked number one  – http://www.who.int/whr/2000/en/annex06_en.pdf

The WHO ranks the United States overall as 37 because we don’t have socialized health care; meaning that doesn’t meet socialists standard of “fairness”.

http://www.who.int/whr/2000/en/whr00_en.pdf – look here and do a search for the words “fairness in contributions” to see for yourself.

This means that the ranking of 37 has little to do with the quality of care people receive and it has everything to do with ideology and politics.

UPDATE II – 12- 15- 09 An article coming to the same conclusion that we did above about the WHO report LINK.