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Socialism kills A story on the UK news last night gave statistics on trauma patients. Those are the seriously injured who must be transported from an accident site to a trauma centre. The percentages of trauma patients who die are:
UK – 43%
US – 16%
Draw your own conclusions.
I happened to be near a TV last night and was so stunned by the numbers that I pulled out my clipboard and wrote them down. The news feature also noted that ambulance first responders were insufficiently trained and often did not carry out measures such as clearing air passages. It also discussed the idea of having specialist regional trauma centre’s. If any one else was watching last night, their inputs on this TV report and the data behind it are welcome. The only thing I have found so far on the net is this
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My conclusions are that without citable sources this is a non-story.
Which news programme, and when was it broadcast?
Where were the statistics gathered, over how long? Do you know if the UK and US figures are comparable? For example, could the lower US figure be because more people proportionally are dead on the scene when the medical services arrive?
I would like to have a link to the source, too. I’m an American, and know people who advocate national health care here. This is a relevant point—but I’m not going to quote an unattributed statistic.
If this is accurate my guess would be that it has to do with the relative proximity of a hospital to a given accident site. My (admittedly academic) understanding of the NHS is that there are lots of clinics for basic healthcare and fewer hospitals that provide advanced or intensive care – I don’t live in the UK so feel free to correct me if this isn’t true. In the US, one of the reasons our care is so expensive is that every tiny town in America has a tertiary care hospital. Which implies that, if you’re in an accident, the ambulance doesn’t have far to go to get you to a hospital that can treat you immediately. Could it be that the distances are more likely to be greater (and the queues longer) between the accident site and emergency dept. in the UK? In any case, that’s just my guess.
To modify a phrase from the article below
http://www.mises.org/story/740
“Socialist Healthcare; Socialist Death”
most us cities have the system described. level I and level II trauma centers about the city EMS is directed based on injury and patient loads at the hospital – usually one burn unit of the best quality. We have lifeflight (choppers) as well so the argument of a single center being too far away is moot… lifeflight will bring people in from hundreds of miles away…fixed wing too
reminds me of Rudy’s radio ad:
Being from the UK we know that the problem is not with our NHS. Instead the problem rests with those in charge of administering our taxes and those who employ expensive consultants at the expense of the health care and patients well being.
If all the money was going to were it was supposed to be going then the NHS would work to the benefit of us all.
However our taxes go towards propping up the military and financing manufactured wars/crusades. Our taxes also go towards paying large salaries and financing a false economy where we attract foreign investment with tax money and the private investors benefit while the rest of us live in abject poverty.
Socialism doesn’t kill – Private investment, corporations, false wars designed to keep themselves in power at the expense of us all and greedy governments lining their own pockets and providing jobs for the boys.
So before providing statistics that cant be measured considering Britain has a smaller population than the US, why not consider the fact that other problems with the capitalist system is failing the National Health Service in Britain and not the principle of free health care which SHOULD be FREE to all!
Actually, the percentage of trauma patients who die is 100%.
David
you forgot your /sarcasm tag
Spidly: if only.
David, you are right, communism only killed eighty million or so people in the 20th century, so what say we just give it another try, ok?
guy,
Funnier if you’d added, “eventually”.
David,
Clearly healthcare can be free. I’m prepared to volunteer as an orthopedic surgeon. I’ve got plenty of tools out in the shed and some Dettol in the kitchen. Even without that it could certainly be a lot cheaper if our hospitals didn’t ever hire “consultants”. Abject poverty, er mate? “Abject poverty” doesn’t, last I checked, include having internet access which you clearly do. Try lecturing the shoe-less peasantry of Cuba or North Korea about your abject poverty. Not, of course, that if you lived in Cuba you’d be allowed free access to the ‘net… You know, in case you came across terribly evil free-market sites like this and they corrupted you…
It was more than 80 million Perry.
Assuming that David is real…..
David – the money that the government says is going to the N.H.S really is going to the N.H.S it is NOT really going to the military.
Some is indeed spent on advisers (using the word “consultants” is confusing – as in the N.H.S “consulatant” also means a senior doctor), but only a tiny percentage of the total money (I doubt it is one per cent).
We used to be told that the N.H.S. was not good because not enough money was spent (althought the “cuts” under Mrs Thatcher were, in fact, large increases in spending).
Well that theory has been tested to destruction – vast sums of money have been tossed at the N.H.S. and it is still not good.
Although I suppose you could say “if the Americans had the N.H.S. at least three of the evil Republicans running for President would be dead – which would be a good thing for the world”.
Guy Herbert:
Yes indeed 100% of people die (as far as we know). If a person is cured of something he, eventually, just dies of something else.
Fair enough, no one can truthfully dispute your point.
also keep in mind that about 25% of trauma patients in the US are victims of penetrating trauma, aka the gun & knife club (mostly gun).
if the UK penetrating trauma figures are lower, then the survival odds are even worse than they appear.
No one mentioned implementing communism. It’s a bad system that is too bureucratic and open to tyranny.
However how many on here have benefited from laissez faire capitalism? I know I haven’t. I may have an internet connection, I may have a television. But it takes a lot of scrimping and saving to be able to keep them.
Meanwhile we are paid are basic sustenance and in Britain at the moment we are paid slightly below what is necessary, and that wage is decreasing as our economy has to compete with economies in the far east or malaysia – where the cost of paying someone is a lot less.
So therefore our wages have to be driven down to make our economies more attractive to foreign investment and ultimately keep corporations in our country and providing jobs.
Then we have the 1 per cent of our nation who have hoarded all the wealth, while the rest of us live in ABJECT POVERTY in comparison.
Face it you are economic slaves who through the media are taught to dismiss your human right to free health care as communist or socialist. It is not, it is humanist.
The elites who are hoarding almost 99 per cent of your countries wealth bombard the majority through privately owned media, i.e. Elite media because no one else can afford to run such an outlet, with ideas that private health care is good, free education is bad, claiming benefits is bad (you should work in extremely lowly paid unsatisfactory employment, which is barely enough to survive) and then you believe it.* Even though their system is designed to keep you where you are – An economic working class slave!
So not only do you follow their system so blindly but you agree with their own capitalist mentality and strive to be like them when even they know you can never be like them, which in Britain is Margaret Thatchers lasting legacy.
Wake up, you are just one of the herd believing everything you are told. Try thinking outside the box for a change.
*Two legs good four legs bad.
Try thinking at all David.
How is a country where almost half the economy is govenrment spending and the rest is bound up with endless regulations “laissez faire” capitalism?
Have you ever read the works of any of the defenders of laissez faire?
Try Bastiat – and his attacks on government subsidies (open and hidden) to business interests.
As for communism:
There have been and still are many egalitarian communities – most religious, but some secular.
It you wish to become a monk, or to join a secular community, no one is stopping you.
“Abject poverty” of 99% of the population.
And the anti (or rather PRO) Welfare State and endless regulation state line of the elite media – such as the B.B.C.?
Or the private I.T.V.?
Or of private NBC, CBS, CNN, and so on in the United States?
Or of the vast majority of privately owned newspapers in the United States?
Do you never watch television, or listen to the radio?
Have you never been to school or college (harldy strongholds of pro free enterprise thought).
And have you never seen newspapers such as the New York Times or the Guardian?
“David” must be a troll – it is the only logical explination.
Wow, David, it makes me so proud that you are willing to force me to work more in order to provide people with their “basic human right” to medical care. It saddens me, however, that you are too lazy to actually gain some skills, so that you could do something along these lines as well. After all, shouldn’t you do your “duty” to provide these things to others, regardless of the cost to you? This is what you expect of others. Why not put your time and energy where your mouth is.
Of course, the alternative is that you live in “abject poverty” because you are stupid. If this is the case, then I withdraw my accusation of laziness, and suggest that since you are stupid, you not bother to share your opinions with others. They are meaningless, as you are stupid.
Take your pick. Are you “selfish and lazy”, or are you “selfless and stupid”? Inquiring minds want to know.
No, Paul, David is very real, and very representative of the mindset referred to in the post by Pearce a few notches down from this one.
David is threatened by the idea that some people may be able to act without controls on every economic decision they make.
If they get richer, he must be getting more impoverished.
If they are successful, they must be immoral, because he is the epitome of morality, and he exists at a subsistence level.
David is not a troll in the traditional sense—he is the voice of the educational, and intellectual, bankruptcy which teaches that freedom is a threat, and men and women of creative energy must be lashed down in order to prevent them from enslaving the rest of humanity.
Now let’s guess which social entity this philosphy considers to be the repository of all this “higher morality”, and to whom all this controlling power should be entrusted.
Just like a two inch putt—it’s a gimme.
Dale, thanks for the link. It helped me to investigate further.
I remain uncertain if it is socialism or “mere” bureaucracy that is at fault, but what I have found makes for depressing reading (apart from the report’s author being a Dr. Findlay…).
It is not “open to tyranny”, communism is tyranny. It has always been implemented at the muzzle of a gun. Communism means rule by the Party, and the Party is ruled by the men at the top. Tyranny is in the DNA of communism.
The short answer to your question is no-one. There has been nothing like laissez faire capitalism in the UK in the lifetime of anyone here. The 20th century saw the UK moving towards an ever more socialized, regulated society. After a brief pause under the Thatcher government, the rising tide of socialism and governmental dirigisme continues apace. We are so far from laissez faire capitalism that most people could not even begin to comprehend what it might entail. Clearly, you don’t.
“free health care which SHOULD be FREE to all!”
—Free–
hmm does that means no one spent resources on it?
Tell me how that miracle is achieved.
1) To think that the US emergency care system is not socialistic fail to realize that hospitals, by and large, are required to give care without establishing the ability to pay. It’s part of why healthcare costs continue to spiral out of control. There are plenty of people who could pay for health insurance but choose not to because if something really bad happened they know they could easily get out of paying to have their life saved.
2) David, please explain, from the ground up, how you determine that people have some sort of natural right to healthcare? You can make a case for water or air but healthcare? The process of giving care is a human invented process, it requires a giver and a taker, and it can be freely given by the giver, or an agreed upon price can be struck. Your “free” care model only means that you think you or an agent should use force on a disinterested third party to pay for it if the price asked by the giver is too high, or force should be used on the giver to provide it for free. In either case YOU deem to use Force to meet the ends of your moral code. A purely free system of politics and economics would not use Force.
It’s very easy to make a list of all the goodies that people should be getting from the limitless cornucopia of government, but it takes some brains to see that society and culture are bound by limited resources, and as such allocation is a firm reality. And allocation can be done by Force or it can be done through a market where individuals choose tradeoffs which is the foundation of the pricing mechanism. But you can be assured of one thing, once you’ve used Force to make an allocation, a misallocation has resulted, which, by and large, makes people poorer. Do it enough and your culture dies.
At the end of the day, don’t describe what you see around you as Capitalism. It is anything but. Certainly a subset of the business community grafts itself on the State. But it is the State that rears up and deems to control FIRST that creates the environment for businesses to build cozy relationships with it. It basically becomes, if you can’t bet it, join it. But make no mistake, the a priori mentalities that create the Leviathan exist first, businesses simply make their deal with the devil.
I live in South Africa, and every day i see people living in abject poverty.
It makes me want to puke when i hear someone who lives in a society with a 5 quid/hr minimum wage (roughly the daily rate of a casual worker here) and a social safety net that the abovementioned bedraggled citizens of this fair land can only marvel at – try to tell me that he too is living in abject poverty.
The UK may not be utopia, but judging by the immigration figures, it’s the kind of place where someone who is willing to work can still make good life for himself.
So what are the figures of trauma survival and cancer survival between the US and other universal systems like France, Germany, Japan etc?
Then it would be interesting to look at the costs of each one, we know that the US pays about twice as much towards healthcare as the UK, what do the raw numbers actually say in the comparisons.
Has anybody actually done that?
Huan,
I don’t see that the difference between blunt and penetrating trauma makes so much difference. Besides, blunt trauma (to the torso, anyway) is a hell of a lot harder to fix than penetrating trauma. Example: cardiac arrest caused by trauma is always bad bad BAD. Even with immediate access to ACLS, penetrating trauma has something like a 2-3% survival rate, and blunt trauma about 1% (working from memory of my EMT class. Be nice)
I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that our (US) specialization of receiving hospitals is part of the difference, and better training of EMS personnel a large part (especially judging by the article referenced up front) and the greater destruction of civil society in the UK (resulting in more time lost before someone finally calls 999) is part.
In my state, it’s not uncommon for an ambulance to avoid the hospital five minutes away in order to go to the one twenty minutes out: The closer one may have a doctor and a drug vault, but the other might have a hyperbaric chamber (valuable in treating victims of house fires or CO poisoning) or a catheter lab and cardiologist actually on duty (as opposed to at home and carrying a pager, the distinction being huge for the chest-pain patient.) etc. The whole idea isn’t to get the patient to any hospital ASAP. The purpose is to get the patient in front of a doctor who might actually do him some good, ASAP.
Getting a TRAINED responder to the patient is big. In my area, every fire engine is crewed mostly by EMT-Basics and every ambulance has at least one paramedic on board, and every cop has at least some first aid training. Actually, that’s pretty common in this (largely-rural) state.
I don’t know how that compares to the UK. Dale mentioned a lack of airway care pre-hospital, and from context I’m guessing that he means that they’re not suctioning the airway. This is not an advanced technique at all: it’s on the American Red Cross CPR for the Professional Rescuer syllabus, which is only an eight-hour class.
That makes me doubtful about just what they hell goes on in the back of ambulances over there.
Here’s a thought experiment, if anyone’s interested:
In the US, it’s fairly common for people to attend Red Cross (or maybe National Safety Council) First Aid/CPR classes, either as part of work or just on their own. That means that they might be able to be useful in the first minutes of an incident, and might also be more able to recognize when to call 911. How common is this in the UK, and is it relevant to explaining thse numbers.
Daveon
I am glad to see that you support getting rid of Medicare and Medicaid (which started at five billion of both in 1965 and now cost many HUNDREDS OF BILLIONS – plus the “knock on” effects on private costs, just as subsidies to higher education have pushed up tutition fees).
I am also glad that you support getting rid of the vast web of regulations that have also helped push up costs.
As for a “universal system”:
The State of Louisiana (under the influence of the Long family) set up a system of government hospitals that anyone could go to – before Britain did.
“But county hospitals and the like are not truely a universal system, because private hospitals are still allowed”.
They are in Britain also – the hospitals were stolen in 1948 (including hospitals that had been free for centuries), but, in spite of the mass confiscation, some private hospitals have been built since then.
Although, yes, privately owned hospitals are much more common in France or Germany than they are in Britain.
It has sometimes been claimed that the American government is out-of-the-ordinary bad at such things as health, education and welfare.
For example, it was claimed, France manages a system where tax pays most of the bill (with a bit of private top up) much better than the United States manages Medicare and so on. However, there are now all sorts of problems emerging with French health care.
It much the same with education – which again the French government was said to run so much better than the various levels of government in the United State.
However, claims are still made for Finnish and Bavarian government education (libertarian though I am I have soft spot for Bavarian state schools myself – “a soft spot between your ears” O.K. but there is vastly less form filling and bureacracy than in British schools, and the Bavarians still teach Latin – which impresses an uneducated barbarian like me).
Still, how anyone could think something like the American government could handle organizing the health care of 300 million people is beyond me.
This is a government which, for example, can not advance beyond the 1970’s in air traffic control (why do not the people who demand that the United States adopt Canadian style government control of health care [a system that means that a lot of Candians either have to go to the United States or die waiting for treatment] not suggest that the United States adopt Canadian style privately owned air traffic control?)
“Government does not work because Bush and the Republicans are in charge” – errr no, the American government has been “just about” to sort out X, Y, Z problems all my life.
All that happens is that more money is spent and the problem gets worse.
Looking to government to solve problems is crazy.
Although it is a crazyness that invests the right as well as the left.
For example, I can well remember Bill O’Reilly demanding that government deal with air travel problems by “stepping in with regulations” – as if this was not one of the most regulated industries in the United States (the only “deregulation” was on prices), and American air traffic control was not one of the most government (and Congressional politics) dominated systems in the world.
Still even Mr O’Reilly does not believe that the government can pay for or organize the health care of 300 million Americans.