Girl, 3, has heart operation cancelled three times (UK socialized healthcare)

Aha. A story I can comment upon. My sister works in the Bristol Royal Infirmary, which is next door to the Bristol Children's Hospital. She is visiting me today. She knows of this case and says that the BCH reschedules operations in this way only if there is no danger to the patient. In the event of danger to the patient's life, a helicopter or ambulance would take them to the nearest available bed. So, a non-story really.

It would be a non-story if it happened once, this was three times in a month.

At least she will end up with her heart operation and not be allow to die if her friends and family members are unable to come up with a few hundred thousands dollars upfront.

OK Mr Wise Guy, how would you reorganise the UK National Health Service?

More then likely he would double the cost and allow 30 percent of the citizens to go without health care IE the US model.

In my opinion, medicine needs to be about saving lives and this clearly does not seem like a good medical practice. We need to not spend all our government money on health care but instead invest it in research and developments so that we can further society rather than making sure every person can get flu medicine when needed. A great example of what good R and D can do is this heart bypass surgery performed by a robot. http://heartbypass.org/robotic-heart-bypass-surgery-video.php

We need to do about four or five things, all simple, all inexpensive:

Eliminate medical lawsuits. That would immediately eliminate half or more of the cost of medicine in the US. You'd have to also establish a general fund to pay victims of malpractice for real losses, and a system to weed out bad doctors.

Eliminate overly restrictive practices in schools which turn out doctors, anesthesiologists and the like. That's basically trust busting.

Eliminate monopolistic practices involving drugs: more trust busting.

Eliminate the WW-II era idea of triage where it clearly isn't called for and/or doesn't work. That means eliminating the idea of the indigent using emergency rooms as medical centers etc. etc.


There might be a couple of other things to add to that list, but that's the general idea. That first item of course would be the hardest step. The trial lawyers' guild is one of the two major sources of funding for the demoKKKrat party...