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Old February 24th, 2008 #1
Alex Linder
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Default Health Care

Britain’s health care amounts to malpractice

By Deroy Murdock
February 23, 2008

Before American voters embrace either Hillary Clinton’s universal-health scheme or Barack Obama’s single-payer proposal, they should consider the avoidable deaths that plague the mother of all state-run medical programs: Great Britain’s big-government National Health Service. Low-quality, taxpayer-funded health care killed more than 17,000 Britons in 2004, according to the TaxPayers’ Alliance in London.

The TPA examined the World Health Organization’s data to contrast the NHS with the Dutch, French, German and Spanish health systems, which are less government-dominated. While those four countries averaged a 106.6 amenable mortality rate, Britain was almost 29 percent deadlier, with its rate of 135.3. The TPA thus calculates that the NHS took the lives of 17,157 Britons who otherwise would have survived were they treated by doctors across the English Channel. Comparing 60 million Brits to 300 million Yanks, this is like a federally operated health agency eliminating 85,785 Americans.

“Anyone looking to reform the American health-care system should learn lessons from the European experience,” says TPA analyst Matthew Sinclair.

No one can complain that the NHS is underfinanced. This year’s budget is $210 billion - about $1.05 trillion if adjusted to match America’s population.

The British Department of Health supervises the NHS. In turn, the NHS includes Primary Care Trusts, NHS Trusts and Regional Strategic Health Authorities. Drugs are controlled by the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence. The NHS Pay Review Body oversees staff compensation. Connecting for Health runs the National Program for IT, reportedly Earth’s single, largest information-technology initiative. Within this maze, patient needs often yield to the wants of pols and medicrats.

The consequences for these political considerations can be ugly.

Poor sanitation has become the NHS’ latest worry. The British government estimated that 9 percent of inpatients in 2000 suffered hospital-acquired infections.

Diseases snuff Britons sooner than they do others in the developed world. A September 2007 Lancet Oncology article found 66.3 percent of American men alive five years after cancer diagnosis. Only 44.8 percent of Englishmen survived after five years. Across the European Union, 20.1 females per 100,000 under 65 died prematurely of circulatory disease. Among British women, that number was 23.6.

Collectively, these data strongly rebuff the notion that America’s imperfect health-care industry needs a booster shot of mandates and regulations.

John McCain’s ideas - among them, expanded health-savings accounts; individually owned, portable health-insurance policies available across state lines; and tort reform - are the antidote to the “health care with a British accent” that Clinton or Obama would import.

http://news.bostonherald.com/news/op...position=rated
 
Old June 27th, 2013 #2
Anders Hoveland
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Default Effect of Immigration on Hospitals

Bankrupting Hospitals

In the USA, all the illegal immigrants (and their many children who live in poverty) are bankrupting hospitals. Hospitals must accept any person who requires emergency treatment, whether they have the ability to pay or not. Hospitals which are not willing to treat the poor for free are not elligible to bill the government Medicare program for any services. Hospitals have to pass on the increased costs from the emergency departments (which almost always are costly and unprofitable) to people who do have the ability to pay. This is one of the main reasons that medical costs are so high. The overburdened hospitals often do not have the resources to properly take care of all the people who cannot pay. When something goes wrong, the hospitals get sued for millions of dollars, or even are forced to shut down by government health regulators for not providing adequate care.

In crowded cities with many poor immigrants, there are long lines to get into the emergency rooms at the hospitals, the waiting rooms are crowded, and it is not uncommon for people to have to wait in lines which stetch outside the hospital. The waiting time is often hours. There have been countless instances of people dying will waiting for treatment. In Los Angeles, California, ambulances are often turned away from overburdened hospitals, often having to drive their patients to other hospitals, which can be up to 2 hours away. In Los Angeles, there are only two hospitals which are not facing impending bankruptcy!

When a hospital is forced to close down, it does not solve the problem. All the non-paying patients it formerly had to take care of have to drive farther to hospitals in more affluent areas. This can result in cascading failure, where the increased burden from one hospital shutting down creates an unsustainable burden on other nearby hospitals, which ultimately results in a chain of hospital closures. In lower income areas, there are often not any nearby hospitals left which accept Medicare.

You might ask why hospitals just stop accepting Medicare so they do not have to treat the poor for free.

In the USA, workers are taxed to pay for the Medicare system. The idea is that they are taxes while they are in their younger working years to help pay for their own medical expenses when they get older. If you want to get less expensive treatment at a hospital which does not have to treat the poor, you will not be getting any of your Medicare tax money back! You will have to pay the full ammount of the bill, and Medicare will not reimburse you or the hospital for any portion, despite the fact that you were taxed all of your working life.

How much are the Taxes?
Employers must withold 1.45% of the salaries of their workers, with the employer also paying an additional matching 1.45% of salaries paid. A self-employed individual must pay the entire 2.9% tax on self employed net earnings. Because of of the increasing burden on hospitals, the tax rate will soon be increased to 3.8% for higher incomes.

Under the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act of 1985, hospitals are obligated to treat the uninsured without reimbursement.

Government imposes viciously stiff fines and penalties on any physician and any hospital refusing to treat any patient that a zealous prosecutor deems an emergency patient, even though the hospital or physician screened and declared the patient's illness or injury non-emergency. But government pays neither hospital nor physician for treatments. In addition to the fiscal attack on medical facilities and personnel, EMTALA is a handy truncheon with which to pummel politically unpopular physicians by falsely accusing them of violating EMTALA."

In 2010, the direct cost to taxpayers to provide free emergency health care for more than 52,000 illegal aliens in the state of Massachusetts alone was $35.7 million. Note that this is only the direct cost; the hospitals subsidize their emergency departments through charity or higher costs to other patients.

84 California hospitals are closing their doors as a direct result of the rising number of illegal aliens and their non-reimbursed tax on the system. Between 1993 and 2003, 60 California hospitals closed because half their services became unpaid. Another 24 California hospitals are on the verge of closure.

The Texas Hospital Association has estimated that the annual cost to hospitals of providing medical treatment to illegal immigrants, who are either unable or unwilling to pay, was nearly $400 million a year, of which the hospitals only get compensated about $100 million through the emergency Medicaid program paid for by the state.

The "Children with Special Health Care Needs" program is a supplemental health care program designed to help indigent children with extraordinary or chronic health care problems that are too expensive to treat in traditional Medicaid. Although the program does not distinguish between legal residents and illegal residents, most of the children enroled in the program are not citizens. In December of 2005, there were 1,452 non-citizens in the program, which constituted 68.8 % of all clients enrolled. 78.9% of the medical payments are spent on these non-citizens.

The USA is only beginning to see the medical costs from illegal immigrants, most of whom came as younger adults. As these people age, they will place an increasing burden on hospitals and the government, which pays for elderly care facillities. Note that the legal-born children of illegal immigrants, who do not show up in the statistics, will be far more expensive to take care of than their parents.

A case study
Cristobal Silverio emigrated illegally from Mexico to Stockton, Calif., in 1997 to work as a fruit picker. He brought with him his wife, Felipa, and three children, 19, 12 and 8 - all illegals. When Felipa gave birth to her fourth child, daughter Flor, the family had what is referred to as an "anchor baby" - an American citizen by birth who provided the entire Silverio clan a ticket to remain in the U.S. permanently. But Flor was born premature, spent three months in the neonatal incubator and cost the San Joaquin Hospital more than $300,000. Meanwhile, oldest daughter Lourdes married an illegal alien gave birth to a daughter, too. Her name is Esmeralda. And Felipa had yet another child, Cristian. The two Silverio anchor babies generate $1,000 per month in public welfare funding for the family. Flor gets $600 a month for asthma. Healthy Cristian gets $400. While the Silverios earned $18,000 last year picking fruit, they picked up another $12,000 for their two "anchor babies."


Immigrants bringing in Third World Diseases

Many illegal aliens harbor fatal diseases that American medicine fought and vanquished long ago, such as drug-resistant tuberculosis, malaria, leprosy, plague, polio, dengue, and Chagas disease."

A report from the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons describes that the spread of diseases brought into the country. Tuberculosis had largely disappeared from America, thanks to excellent hygiene and powerful modern drugs such as isoniazid and rifampin," says the report. "TB's swift, deadly return now is lethal for about 60 percent of those infected because of new Multi-Drug Resistant Tuberculosis. Until recently MDR-TB was endemic to Mexico. This Mycobacterium tuberculosis is resistant to at least two major anti-tubercular drugs. Ordinary TB usually is cured in six months with four drugs that cost about $2,000. MDR-TB takes 24 months with many expensive drugs that cost around $250,000 with toxic side effects. Each illegal with MDR-TB coughs and infects 10 to 30 people, who will not show symptoms immediately. Latent disease explodes later. TB was virtually absent in Virginia until in 2002, when it spiked a 17 percent increase, but Prince William County, just south of Washington, D.C., had a much larger rise of 188 percent. Public health officials blamed immigrants. In 2001 the Indiana School of Medicine studied an outbreak of MDR-TB, and traced it to Mexican illegal aliens. The Queens, New York, health department attributed 81 percent of new TB cases in 2001 to immigrants. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention ascribed 42 percent of all new TB cases to 'foreign born' people who have up to eight times higher incidences apparently, 66 percent of all TB cases coming to America originate in Mexico, the Philippines and Vietnam." Chagas disease, also called American trypanosomiasis or "kissing bug disease," is transmitted by the reduviid bug, which prefers to bite the lips and face. The protozoan parasite that it carries, Trypanosoma cruzi, infects 18 million people annually in Latin America and causes 50,000 deaths. The disease also infiltrates America's blood supply. Chagas disease affects blood transfusions and transplanted organs. No cure exists. Hundreds of blood recipients may be unknowingly infected. Leprosy, also known as Hansen's disease, was so rare in America that in 40 years only 900 people were afflicted. Suddenly, in the past three years America has more than 7,000 cases of leprosy. Leprosy now is endemic to northeastern states because illegal aliens and other immigrants brought leprosy from India, Brazil, the Caribbean and Mexico. Dengue fever is exceptionally rare in America, though common in Ecuador, Peru, Vietnam, Thailand, Bangladesh, Malaysia and Mexico. Recently, according to the report, there was a virulent outbreak of dengue fever in Webb County, Texas, which borders Mexico. Though dengue is usually not a fatal disease, dengue hemorrhagic fever routinely kills. Polio was eradicated from America, but now reappears in illegal immigrants as do intestinal parasites, according to the report. Malaria was obliterated, but now is re-emerging in Texas.
 
Old April 21st, 2014 #3
ayan05
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Yeah well malpractice may also be present if a patient has not given informed consent before undergoing treatment. Your doctor should discuss the nature, risks andbenefits of any proposed treatment, as well as other reasonable options.
 
Old June 16th, 2014 #4
Englisc
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Yeah there's malpractice, but the OP article doesn't prove that this malpractice in the NHS is a result of the NHS being run mainly by the government. Large parts of our NHS nowadays is actually run by the private sector.

Here are some other statistics.

In 2000-2002, which is close to the year 2004, almost 200,000 died in the US per year because of medical errors
http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/releases/11856.php

Currently there is already about 100,000 deaths per year as a result of this
http://www.justice.org/cps/rde/justice/hs.xsl/8677.htm

(most recent study) U.S. has most expensive, least effective health care system... The United Kingdom, which spends just $3,405 per person on health care, placed first overall in the comparison of 11 nations
http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/t...tem-in-survey/



NHS 'most efficient healthcare system in the world'
http://www.politics.co.uk/news/2011/...ent-healthcare

Fraud could be costing US healthcare as much as $270 billion
http://www.economist.com/news/united...illion-swindle
 
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