Universal Health Care -- shhhh don't talk to the nurses

Imagine being in a hospital and you start to feel a chest pain and shortness of breath, you yell out to a group of nurses that are nearby, and much to your shock and horror they turn around and command you to shhhhhhh -- there on the front of their medical frocks emblazoned in bold white letters it reads "Do not Disturb"

Can you imagine Florence Nightingale walking among the wounded in the Crimea with a sign round her neck saying ‘Do not disturb’? Or wearing a uniform emblazoned with the words ‘Sort out your own problems — I’m too important to help’?

That's exactly what is happening in Britain where patients are outraged at the latest chilling inversion to the basic tenets of health care. In NHS (National Health Service ) hospital wards today, nurses are sporting bright red tabards printed on the front with the bold words: ‘Do not disturb, drug round in progress.’

After pilot schemes in Kent, these deeply offensive tabards are to be worn by nurses in hospitals across the country. The rationale, according to the hospital trusts, is that patients asking nurses for help will distract them while they are giving out medicines.

The idea, while typical of government run entities, seems grotesque and ridiculous, and is a perversion to the whole idea of health care. I mean if you can't do more that one thing at a time, maybe you should be working on an assembly line at the auto plant, not as a nurse at a hospital.

There are still a lot of hard working dedicated professionals working at hospitals both here in the U.S. and Britain, but that is changing. Government run health care is changing the game, and many would say not for the better. There are far too many people in health care that maybe should not be there, and spend most of their time hiding behind computers, laboriously filling in forms or chatting among themselves.

America is often criticized for its lack of a universal health-care system comparable to the Europeans and Canadians, even though Germany, the United Kingdom and even Canada are increasingly turning to the private sector in order to relieve the financial burden on government and solve serious delivery problems, most notably rationing by queue, and a prolonged wait times for many services, including critical care services cancer treatment and cardiac surgery.

So if you happened to be unfortunate enough to have had a stay in the hospital recently, and had that feeling of deja vu, that you were not at the hospital, but at the DMV getting your drivers' license renewed, it's not your imagination. over half the health care in America is now government run health care.

Helping people is a moral issue. The government should not be in the business of forcing people to do moral things.

From : The Daily Mail