Annals of Government Medicine

Under government medicine, all health care is necessarily political. Why anyone would want to live in that world is beyond me. Here is the latest from Great Britain, where the Labour government is trying to keep budget cuts secret until after the election:

Tens of thousands of NHS workers would be sacked, hospital units closed and patients denied treatments under secret plans for £20 billion of health cuts.
The sick would be urged to stay at home and email doctors rather than visit surgeries, while procedures such as hip replacements could be scrapped. …
Documents show that health chiefs are considering plans to begin sacking workers, cutting treatments and shutting wards across the country.

This one is especially scary:

In the East region, covering Bedfordshire, Cambridgeshire, Essex, Hertfordshire, Norfolk and Suffolk, up to £2 billion is to be cut. The SHA proposes shifting services out of hospitals and making social workers take over some treatments.

Hey, that makes sense: they have a shortage of doctors and a surplus of social workers, so let’s have the social workers start diagnosing diseases and performing surgery. That’s what I call a death panel!

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