Saturday, January 17, 2015

ObamaCare Is Everywhere

by JASmius



In light of last year's Veteran's Administration scandal (single-payer "healthcare" for vets) and the ongoing ObamaCare cataclysm, see if this story doesn't sound awfully familiar:

As Helen Church woke up one morning just before Christmas 2012, the pain that had been building for weeks behind her right eye reached an excruciating climax.

Screaming in agony, she ran around her east-end Toronto apartment before finally managing to call 911 and passing out.

For the second time in short succession, she had fallen victim to health care gone badly awry.

Just two years earlier, Ms. Church went to a nearby hospital to have an ovary removed as treatment for a painful cyst. She left hours later with the ovary still in place — and a piece of mesh embedded in her abdomen to repair a non-existent hernia.

Then, months later, a specialist replaced an artificial, cataract-correcting lens that he said had started to wear. The result: That eye was now blind and growing increasingly painful.

The ophthalmologist, another specialist told her later, had implanted the lens in the wrong position, obscuring her sight and puncturing a duct, causing a slow bleed and massive pressure.

“There was so much blood in there, it blew the eyeball out of my head. It was hanging on my cheek,” said Ms. Church, a razor-sharp 83-year-old. “The blood was just dripping everywhere … I was hysterical, the pain was so bad.”

Both incidents point to dangerous breakdowns in the Canadian health-care system. But don’t expect to find any public record of either apparent blunder — or of thousands of similarly harmful and sometimes deadly mistakes that occur in facilities across the country each year.

Most instances of the system hurting rather than healing patients, in fact, are not even reported by staff internally, a National Post investigation has documented.

Research suggests that about 70,000 patients a year experience preventable, serious injury as a result of treatments. More shocking, a landmark study published a decade ago estimated that as many as 23,000 Canadian adults die annually because of preventable “adverse events” in acute-care hospitals alone.

The rate of errors may be even higher today, some evidence suggests, despite the millions of dollars spent on much-touted patient-safety efforts.

Yet a tiny fraction of those cases are publicly acknowledged and usually only in the form of antiseptic statistics. For most serious treatment gaffes, not even the sparsest of details is revealed, making the vast problem all but invisible.

And that's because socialized medicine, just like socialized education and socialized pensions and socialized everything-the-hell-else, is, by definition, a monopoly.  Which I could have sworn "progressives" bitterly opposed.

No, not a private sector Monopoly.....



.....but a public sector monopoly - which "progressives" passionately love.....



....morally superior and, therefore, answerable to nobody.....



....and, as a President of the United States once said, functionally immortal:

A government bureau is the nearest thing to eternal life we’ll ever see on this earth

Boy, it sure is a good thing that Americans have never voted for anything like that, isn't it?

Isn't it?

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