when doctors told him they could have to switch off her life support machine, Mr Sullivan took drastic action--by giving his wife a firm telling-off. He held his wife's hand and demanded: "You start fighting. Don't you dare give up on me now. I've had enough, stop mucking around and start breathing. Come back to me.The chilling part of the story is experts had decided she was a hopeless case (after only 2 weeks --but what's one woman more or less?) and were going to take her off life support (yay, nationalized health care!).
"Two hours later she started to breathe steadily again
In other why-can't-we-provide-free-health-care-for-all news, you know how Britain's NHS assures that everyone gets treatment within four hours of arriving at the hospital? Leaving them in ambulances for up to five hours --with the additional benefit that said ambulances are out of commission for coming to anyone else's rescue.
Labour brought in the four-hour A&E target to end the scandal of patients waiting for days in casualty or being kept on trolleys in corridors.
But a shortage of out-of-hours GP care, after thousands of doctors opted out of treating patients outside working hours under lucrative new contracts, means more and more are going to casualty units, putting them under greater pressure.
That is the inevitable logic of big bureaucracies. I remember when my parents traveled on a journalists' exchange to the Soviet Union. One evening the women on the tour were treated to an opera where the Opera House was unheated in the dead of winter. Mom wanted to keep her coat, but some burly Soviet matron followed to her seat and yelled at her until she relinquished it to coat check. (And the opera proceeded, with no one able to hear too well over all the coughing from the audience.) I asked a friend of the family who was a Soviet expert what the purpose of that was --surely the Soviets didn't think that sort of treatment was making a good impression? His response was that if people keep their coats, there's nothing to justify the coat-check person's job.
And if we just leave people in ambulances, no one will know how inadequate our health care service is. And if we give up on the critically ill prematurely, we can bring one of those people from the ambulances in for treatment. I'm so looking forward to nationalized health care.
