A TV documentary shows the third-world conditions in a British hospital.

Too bad. So much for the vaunted National Health Service. Also, like the prisoners in Afghanistan pleading for tickets to Cuba, it sounds like the patients would have been better off at Guantanamo...

My wife broke her wrist in France some time back. The French doctor advised her to stay over and be treated there. The standards were excellent.
Back home in the UK she attended the local hospital five times before being discharged. She was seen promptly and with immaculate care each time. The standard was at least as good as that in France.

It is misleading to generalise particular cases.

We did not comment that in France the operator of the ECG machine found it necessary to read the instructions from the handbook step by step, as she did.

We know many people who had had excellent care on the NHS and no one in our circle who has not. But I guess good care does not make good news reports.

No, good news is never news. While I did take a shot at NHS (and I do have a low opinion of government-run health-care systems, though I think that the one in the US is a mess as well), my real point was that I didn't hear any complaints from the sob sisters at the Guardian et al about how these poor innocent elderly patients were being treated--they were too busy whining about how we're treating terrorists in Cuba, who are in fact receiving better health care, on the face of it, than the people described in this story.

Bill Humpage is right, in that generalizations should not be made from particular cases. It may be that what was filmed was an extraordinary case of a local hospital being overwhelmed by an unexpected flood of ill people.

Yet....

Wasn't the NHS sold to the British people fifty-odd years ago as a way to provide first-class care on the cheap? That, through the miracles of "modern" management, and through economies of scale wrought by centralization, bureaucratization, and elimination of the profit motive, all British subjects would have speedy, effective care delivered in comfortable settings at minimal cost?

Too bad that it has turned out to be a sick joke. And the Brits are too stupid to realize it! It's enough to make me wonder about my own ancestors, who were almost exclusively English or Scots-Irish......

You know, Britain spends about a third as much on health as the US does. The US spends about twice as much on health care as every other rich country, except Britain. Yet in health care statistics, for major things like life expectancy and peoples' happiness with the system, the US comes last or near last in every measure. We alternate for last place with the British on most categories. All this, despite the fact that we spend twice as much as everyone else (except the British, who spend 1/3)... Makes you think, don't it?