Waiting For Doctor Goodbar

For the last two years we have been hearing how it is time for the government to take over the health care system in order to save money and provide greater coverage for those "millions" we are told do not have health care. Never mind that the vast majority of those uninsured are uninsured by CHOICE and not because they were somehow priced out of the system. What these advocates of government run health care refuse to tell you is that the same bureaucracies that have so successfully run Medicare, Medicade and who managed the banking system will be the very same bureaucracies in charge of YOUR HEALTH.

A glimpse of government run health care can be found in Canada, France and the U.K. In the past I have highlighted cases here of the type of care that can be found in these countries. Thanks to the Admiral at Anti-Strib, we have three classic cases of the quality of care that you can find in Canada and Great Britian.

First, from Ontario...

Emergency room waiting times at some Ontario hospitals are prompting seriously ill people to walk away, sometimes with fatal results, health officials say.

Dr. Sean Gartner says 11 per cent of the people who came to the emergency room at his hospital in Guelph last month ended up leaving without receiving treatment.

A few months earlier, Gartner said an elderly man who left after he became tired of waiting was later found dead.

In February, Patricia Vepari, a 21-year-old engineering student, arrived at a Kitchener hospital emergency room with a fever, sore throat and nausea.

Facing an eight-hour wait, she decided to go home, where she died of an infection.

Then to Winnepeg...

Health officials say a man who died in the waiting area of a major Winnipeg hospital's emergency department may have been dead "for some time" before medical staff was alerted — 34 hours after he arrived.

The 45-year-old arrived by taxi at the Health Sciences Centre around 3 p.m. Friday from the Health Action Centre, a community health centre in central Winnipeg, where he had an earlier appointment, officials said.

Then to Toronto...

Hospital backlogs that leave patients in waiting rooms or on stretchers in a so-called "hall of shame" are to blame for three people dying within 24 hours at Etobicoke General Hospital, a city paramedic union leader alleges.

Glenn Fontaine, unit ambulance chairman for Toronto Paramedic Local 416, claims three people died between Monday and Tuesday at the hospital, with one of them going into cardiac arrest after sitting in the waiting room with chest pains for three hours and another patient dying after waiting with paramedics on an "offload delay" before getting a bed.

And finally across the pond to Great Britian...

DAD-of-two Stewart Fleming grips his head in pain as he waits to be seen in A&E - but he died after being ignored for SIX hours.

Clearly suffering, Stewart was clutching a note from his doctor saying he must be seen IMMEDIATELY.

But the railway signalman, 37, was left to die as a deadly virus ravaged his body and one by one his organs collapsed.

This is the just the precursor of what we can expect if we allow government bureaucrats to be in charge of health care in America. As I ask with every post along these lines - is this what you want for your children and their health?