Research

At the Netroots Nation Convention last weekend Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said a government-run health care system in the United States was a matter of when, not if. Reid’s statement comes on the heels of a pair of Telegraph articles detailing the use of ‘crude’ and ‘astonishingly brutal’ rationing tactics Britain’s government-run primary care trusts have been using to reduce costs.

“Women in labour have been forced to wait while epidural equipment was borrowed from other hospitals, while other patients have been denied chest drains and radiology supplies, according to doctors at South London Healthcare Trust...”

“The document records: ‘The trust in different areas had run out of under water sealed chest drains, epidural packs, gynaecological disposables, radiological disposables, and the response to this was 'this was a cash flow issue.’”

“Plans to cut hundreds of thousands of pounds from budgets for the terminally ill, with dying cancer patients to be told to manage their own symptoms if their condition worsens at evenings or weekends.”

Meanwhile, The New York Times announced Britain’s plans to radically decentralize its National Health Services (NHS) bureaucracy yesterday in favor of a patient and doctor centered system.

England plans to make its shift to a more patient centered system by 2014. Ironically, the US will move closer to Britain’s failed government-run health care system in 2014, when ObamaCare regulations that will restrict patients' choice of plan, doctor and hospital take effect, in addition to the unpopular individual mandate.

Don’t hold your breath if you’re expecting the Obama administration to roll back it’s health care reform plan because of a couple surgeries gone awry in Great Britain or the fact that 58 percent of Americans support repeal of the health care reform bill. After all, there’s no bigger fan of Britain’s health care system in America than Obama’s new Health-Care Rationer-in-Chief CMS Administrator Donald Berwick.