Great Moments in Socialized Medicine
"Poor nursing care, filthy wards and lack of leadership at Basildon and Thurrock University NHS Hospitals FoundationTrust led to the deaths of up to 400 patients a year," London's Daily Telegraph reported Thursday:
Figures compiled by a health watchdog showed death rates at the Essex trust were a third higher than they should have been.
Among the worst failings discovered by the Care Quality Commission were a lack of basic nursing skills, curtains spattered with blood on wards, mould in vital equipment and patients being left in A&E for up to ten hours.
Concerns about death rates at the foundation hospital trust were first raised a year ago, but an internal investigation failed to find anything wrong and managers dismissed the concerns.
But the new report found "systematic failings" in the trust's management, all of whom are still in their jobs. The CQC said its confidence in the management's ability had been "severely dented."
Perhaps the only good news in the whole story comes from former Enron adviser Paul Krugman, who observes: "And as I watched the deniers make their arguments, I couldn't help thinking that I was watching a form of treason--treason against the planet."
Sorry, wrong quote. We mean this one: "I predict that in the years ahead Enron, not Sept. 11, will come to be seen as the greater turning point in U.S. society."
Whoops, wrong again. OK, let's try once more: "In Britain, the government itself runs the hospitals and employs the doctors. We've all heard scare stories about how that works in practice; these stories are false."
That's it. Third time's the charm. And do you know what, Krugman is right. The Daily Mail has the number of deaths cited in the "shocking report" as just 70--well, "at least 70." Oh, but wait, the Mail's Saturday follow-up raises the figure to 3,000. The left-wing Observer, a Sunday paper, says 5,000.
But does it really matter? As Stalin is said to have observed, while one death is a tragedy, a million are a statistic. And here's a first for this feature: a tragedy--or prospective tragedy--here in the U.S. It comes from Krugman's New York Times colleague, Nicholas Kristof, who has no connection to Enron.
It seems that 23-year-old John Brodniak has a cavernous hemangioma, "an abnormal growth of blood vessels, and in John's case it is chronically leaking blood into his brain." He suffers from constant pain, impairments of memory and coordination, and nausea and vomiting. There is a danger of premature death should a blood vessel burst. Surgery could relieve his condition, but he says doctors won't operate on him because he's uninsured, and he can't get insurance because he has a pre-existing condition.
If any of our readers are in a position to help this young man, please email us and we'll pass the information along to Kristof.
From the standpoint of public policy, though, the key passage in the Kristof column is this one:
In August, he qualified for an Oregon Medicaid program, but he hasn't been able to find a doctor who will accept him as a patient for surgery, apparently because the reimbursements are so low.
Somehow Kristof thinks he has made an argument for more government control over health care, when in fact the case he has made against it is nothing short of devastating.
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