Whenever you need an example of how bad socialized medicine can be, the clowns who run Britain’s health care system are always ready to oblige. This time, NHS apparatchiks have decided to auction off desperately needed organs while British transplant patients die on the waiting list:
Organs from British NHS donors are being given to private foreign patients ahead of desperately-ill Britons, it was revealed last night … Some 50 livers were given to patients from Cyprus, Greece and other countries last year, even though 259 British patients were waiting for life-saving transplants.
The advocates of government-run health care keep telling us that getting the wicked “profit motive” out of medicine will make our system more equitable. Tell that to this patient (and his parents):
One-year-old Ethan Collins will die within weeks if he does not receive a new liver and intestine … But if they did become available in the UK, he could face competition from overseas patients.
Meanwhile:
Foreigners pay around £75,000 for a liver transplant. The money is shared between the transplant surgeon, who may get around £20,000, and the hospital trust.
What’s a dead baby or two when one can pick up £75,000 per liver from rich Greeks and Cypriots? And if you think the bureaucrats are ashamed of this disgraceful practice, you’d better think again:
A spokesman for King’s College Hospital said: ‘Citizens of the European Union have the same entitlement to treatments under the NHS as UK patients, under European law.’
This is government health care folks—-apparatchiks deciding who lives or dies based on whatever criteria they happen to prefer on any given day. Don’t think this kind of BS can go on here? Stay tuned.
Comments 3
This story and your reporting of it is wrong in almost every respect. First, no organs are being sold - that’s illegal. The bills are for hospital care. Second, those bills are paid mostly by other EU governments in small countries such as Cyprus where they do not have transplant programmes. And organs are not only donated to other European Union nationals, but organs are also exchanged with other countries, based on clinical need. And the number we are talking about in the UK is very small compared with organs taken up by UK nationals. And no Briton is dying because of this - in some cases livers are actually divided to take care of two people; in other cases the most suitable match is made rather than throw away material. Are people dying on transplant lists? Yes, but that’s true everywhere as overall there is a shortage of organs.
Posted 06 Jan 2009 at 4:20 am ¶Nice try, Mr. Brown, but no matter how much lipstick you smear on this beast, it’s still a pig.
Posted 06 Jan 2009 at 8:06 am ¶“Yes, but that’s true everywhere as overall there is a shortage of organs.”
Not so much in Iran, because they don’t ban compensation for organs.
Posted 06 Jan 2009 at 12:14 pm ¶Post a Comment