Single Payer Healthcare - Advocates

Single Payer Healthcare - Advocates of Single Payer Heathcare - and the Twin Cities are crawling with them - say we couldn't possibly have any worse-quality healthcare than we do now, and point to the British system as an example of how to do it right.

Not that years of other evidence to the contrary has had any effect, of course. But this story is the cherry on the sludge sundae:

BRITISH hospital managers gave a surgeon a dessert spoon to use in a hip replacement operation, prompting him to spend £150 ($405) of his own money to buy the proper instrument, a tribunal has heard.

Dr Godfrey Charnley later quit his job and is suing the public agency that runs Derriford Hospital in Plymouth, south-western England, for allegedly forcing him out.

Just a fluke?

He said assistants had given him a sterilised metal dessert spoon instead of a curette, a sharp-edged, spoon-shaped tool he should have had to scrape cartilage and damaged bone from the hip socket...He held up a household spoon similar to the one he said he was given.

He said the hospital's cost-cutting managers had previously tried to persuade him to use a dessert spoon, but he refused.

The system, threatened, is striking back:

Julian Hoskins, lawyer for the Plymouth Hospitals National Health Service Trust, accused Charnley of threatening Sister Helen Wood, a nun present in the operating room, over a report on the incident "by telling her what you would do or not do unless she tore up that piece of paper".

Charnley replied that he had only asked to see the page to check that it fairly described what had happened.

The surgeon, who now practices at another hospital, also claims managers pressured him to manipulate waiting lists so they would not be fined for making patients wait too long.

What? A bureaucracy, cheating?

Never.

Posted by Mitch at February 23, 2003 10:18 AM