Just a little over a week ago I brought you this story on how you get what you pay for with government health care. It’s “free”, right? Here’s a follow up story on it:

Patients spoke yesterday of their grim experiences in mixed hospital wards and claimed the Government fiddles the figures to suggest that most are now segregated.

Readers of The Daily Telegraph, from Truro to Manchester, said there were often naked and semi-naked patients of the opposite sex in full view and intimate medical discussions were easily overheard.

They said that flimsy partitions were used to indicate that the sexes were separated and that wards were classed as emergency or temporary in order to get around the rules.

The Department of Health says that 99 per cent of NHS trusts comply with the requirement to provide single-sex accommodation but on Thursday Patricia Hewitt, the Health Secretary, admitted there were problems.

…

Single-sex lavatories were achieved by changing the designation on the doors to either male or female depending on the sex of the occupant. “In effect this made the facility unisex,” she said. “I had to endure all the mess left by ill and confused male users of the lavatory.”

A reader from Weston-super-Mare said that last March, at Weston General Hospital, she was on a ward with a partition half way through the room.

“I was taken to a bed on the male side. They said they would move me when a female bed was available.

“When I asked for the curtains to be drawn I was told it was not possible as the nurse needed to see me. I was on the male side when I came round from my operation and found this extremely stressful.

“When I needed to use a commode the curtains were at least 2ft from the floor — very distressing and undignified.”

A woman admitted to the Princess Royal Hospital, Telford, wrote: “I was amazed and embarrassed to find myself staring at a row of men.

“The man opposite had a skin complaint and lay on top of his bed with his pyjamas open and a small paper towel balanced on his private parts.

“Every time he moved the towel fell off.”

A Department of Health spokesman said: “We are aware of these issues and know there is a disparity between our figures and the public view. That is why the Secretary of State has asked strategic health authorities to look into this and to report back to us.”

Government officials love to make reports. It’s one of the few things they are actually pretty good about doing. Too bad they can’t actually accomplish something useful.

As a scientist I can’t think of a better way to bias your research and end up with bogus results:

The record is clear, and once we are able to get hearings on this, everyone will see what they already know, and that is that those who have the least opportunities at this age find themselves in the military, as I did when I was 18 years old.

Not only is Charles Rangel looking to find what he wants to find in these proposed hearings but he is announcing to the world what data he will find and what his conclusions are. Even if he managed to find data completely contradictory to what he believed he would have a difficult time admitting he was wrong and changing his conclusions. For a politician this is even more difficult than for a scientist. But then again he is a politician, not a scientist. For them it’s not about finding the truth or doing the right thing–those things are irrelevant in politics.

That reminds me of a couple jokes:

POLITICIAN: From the Greek `poly’ (“many”) and the French `tete’ (“head” or “face,” as in `tete-a-tete’: head to head or face to face). Hence `polytetien’, a person of two or more faces.

Martin Pitt

And my favorite along this line:

The word ‘politics’ comes from the Greek root ‘poly’, meaning many, and ‘tics’, meaning blood-sucking parasites.

I first saw it at The Smallest Minority. Then a friend from Microsoft (and Boomershoot) sent me a link to it and said, “This bit of fiction just absolutely scared the living daylights out of me.” I’m pretty sure he is Jewish. [I was wrong] That makes at least a little bit of difference in the context.

It’s a good read. You should read the whole thing.

I responded to my friend in email. What follows is a slightly sanitized version of what I said to my friend.

December 7th, 2008 is a Sunday. I’ll be in Idaho.
 
Snarky remarks aside… Except for the level of detail and the scope it’s nothing I hadn’t already been concerned about. In addition to the financial centers I’m nearly certain Jewish population centers in New York City and Los Angles would be attacked–not just the economic targets. I’ve often figured Microsoft would be a target. It’s too successful, too much of a bad influence (all that music and porn that is available via computers) and too big of a reminder of how unsuccessful Muslims are for them to tolerate it’s continued existence.
 
And of course Israel would get it’s share of “gifts”. And probably England as well.
 
I need to find my book on nuclear warfare and see what sort of damage radius can be expected for warheads the size we are expecting. I think that for a 1 kiloton yield a mile or so is sufficient to have a decent chance of surviving the initial blast. That is not to say it would be something the U.S. could or should just shrug off.
 
On the flip side of that scenario I’m not sure most Muslim leaders and certainly North Korea will be very eager to buy into the expected endgame from that sort of attack.

I would expect that within a couple days Iran would have a soft green glow that would last for decades. If not from U.S. “sharing of the love” then from Israel suddenly becoming less inhibited in expressing their feelings toward Muslim extremists. I would expect many Muslim “Holy Cities” would become just “Holes”.

North Korea geography would have some sudden changes that would require some changes in maps-should someone decide to put on their NBC (Nuclear, Biological, and Chemical) suits and visit. 
 
I certainly regard Muslim extremists as an extremely serious threat–more so than North Korea. Watch the trailer for Obsession, The Movie. There are so many parallels between Nazi Germany and Muslims today that one has to be blind, ignorant, or stupid not to see what’s going to happen if we don’t take violent action and follow through on it. Unfortunately we don’t have any good options available to us. I see it as either the long slow road something along the lines of what George Bush attempted, and the Democrats sabotaged, or wholesale genocide. We don’t yet have the moral justification, and certainly not the political will, for genocide. But after we get nuked we may.

It will be ironic. The Democrats all demanding/promising peace and getting swept into office on that force of that idea. Then they deliver the peace of the grave for both us and our enemies.

The people that voted “blue” because of the promise of government supplied health care should be careful what they ask for. They might get it.

Katherine Murphy, spokeswoman for the Patients Association, said the huge budget deficits faced by some NHS trusts – estimated to be over £1 billion – together with the Government’s obsession with targets, was leaving some hospitals with no option but to treat patients of the opposite sex together.

…

‘The Government’s pledge to get rid of mixed sex wards is yet another one of Tony Blair’s broken promises,’ Mrs Murphy said.

‘We’ve seen more and more calls to our patient helpline from distressed women in particular who are being forced to share rooms with men.

…

Last month a review of 153 acute trusts in England revealed that, in some hospitals, two in three patients are still being having to share a room with a member of the opposite sex.

…

‘Allowing trusts to simply put curtains up between patients makes no difference to them whatsoever,’ Mrs Murphy added.

‘It makes a mockery of the Government’s targets and is simply a token gesture that is failing to get to the root of the problem.’

In 1997, the Government set its first target for closing such wards by 1999. But in January 2000 this was revised to 2002.

It was then moved again, to April 2004 – but even this target has now been missed.

Tory health minister Stephen O’Brien said: ‘What further proof do we need of the value of a promise from this Labour Government than their record on mixed sex wards.

‘Four years ago they said they would get rid of mixed sex wards, but four years on the increasing evidence shows the situation is getting worse not better.

‘Financial deficits, caused by the Government’s mismanagement of the NHS, is now leading to less trusts taking the decision to close mixed sex wards.’

And do you really want the government having ready access files on your medical records? What if those “evil homophobic Republicans” could easily find everyone that was gay? Or if the unethical Democrats exposed the Republican candidates (or their daughters or girl-friends) who had abortions when they where a teenager?

Almost lost in the article is the £1 billion deficit (not debt) of the National Health Service. Government health care is not only more expensive than private health care (ask any health care professional how much time they spend dealing with government paperwork) it’s lower quality. Pay more, get less, and leaves you vulnerable to government abuse? You know it has to be the brain child of the loony left.

Update: I forgot to mention that Government Health Care fails my Jews In the Attic Test.

Friday night Ry posted:

My position is that the formation of the Libertarian Party did more to destroy freedom in the United States (and therefore, the world) than any event since.

He and I talked about it at time lunch on Friday. I find it hard to disagree with his reasoning. But it’s a little hard to know for certain because you can’t rerun the experiment to see how it would have turned out had the Libertarian Party not been formed.

The only reasonable argument I can make against his position is that the L-Party has articulated and presented a viewpoint that perhaps would have been even more muddled and lost than it is now.

In any case it’s sobering to think about and it causes me to wonder about other applications of the same thinking. What of Gun Owners of America, The Second Amendment Foundation, Citizens Committee for the Right To Keep and Bear Arms, and JPFO? There I think the case is less clear. One can be a member of not just one but any and all of the organizations. With a political party your candidate either wins or loses. There is no middle ground or somewhat diminished influence when your most favored candidate looses a battle for political office.

The main thrust of this article is something completely different but what really caught my eye was this:

Russia loses around 700,000 people each year – about 0.5 per cent of its total population – to emigration, disease and alcoholism.

It would appear that the “benefits” of socialism last for quite some time after the system has collapsed. One would hope that people not try another “experiment” such as that ever again. What is it? Something like 100 million dead in the last century that can be attributed to socialism and communism? And if the above numbers are correct and characteristic of what happens when socialism collapses one may even make a prediction.  And that prediction would be that the implementation of a “workers paradise” means the complete death of that society. It may be that the only escape from the death throes of that type of disaster is for some other culture to salvage the remnants and rebuild it in a completely different image.

But one could always hope people could learn from the failure of others. But that hope would only reveal that I’m an optimist even in the face of irrefutable evidence to the contrary. I do have irrefutable evidence that people don’t learn from the failures of others–there are still people that vote for the Socialists Democrats in our country.