Susan Stamper Brown, FloydReports.com
Another dreamer quietly joined the Obama administration last summer without Congressional approval. Despite resolute promises that Obamacare would not include rationing or result in a single-payer system, please give a hearty and belated welcome to Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services director, Dr. Donald Berwick.
Berwick’s unobtrusive entrance could not muffle his history of being a very loud proponent of the troubled British National Healthcare System (NHS). During the NHS’s 60th anniversary meeting in 2008, Berwick scorned America’s ho-hum, less superior, lower quality, fragmented, capitalistic, supply-driven medical system – and praised NHS’s socialized system saying, “Excellent health care is by definition [wealth] redistribution,” and told NHS leaders that “Britain chose well.”
An increasing number of NHS patients may not concur with Dr. Berwick’s assessment. According to the UK Guardian, not long after Berwick’s appointment last year, written complaints ranging from “neglect and misdiagnosis” to a “distinct lack of care and compassion” from caregivers rose 13.4 percent.
Patient complaints along with various audits expose insufficiencies within the NHS. On January 17, 2011, the UK Daily Mail told of an investigation into 15 UK West Midlands hospitals that used “substandard” maternity care including delivery delays, inadequate resuscitation attempts, and failure to properly monitor patients that may have resulted in the unexplained deaths of 21 babies.
A striking 2009 audit found many NHS health care managers prioritized cost cutting over patient care and cited that “appalling standards of care” may have attributed to the deaths of up to 1200 people at one hospital in Mid-Staffordshire where poorly trained and overworked nurses turned off equipment they didn’t know how to work and inexperienced doctors were left alone with post-surgery patients while receptionists were tasked with triage assessment.
In order to meet an NHS-imposed four-hour waiting room limit, doctors left blood-covered, seriously ill patients without pain medication to treat….
