When America inevitably votes itself something called universal health care, it is my belief that we’ll see more stories like this one: Tape shows woman dying on waiting room floor
A 49-year-old woman collapsed and died on the floor of a waiting room at a Brooklyn psychiatric hospital and lay there for more than an hour as employees ignored her, according to the New York Civil Liberties Union, which on Tuesday released surveillance camera video of the incident.
While casual readers will come away with the impression that this woman died because of a failure of private healthcare, I am not a casual reader.
The New York City Health and Hospitals Corporation, which oversees the hospital, released a statement Tuesday saying it was “shocked and distressed by this situation. It is clear that some of our employees failed to act based on our compassionate standards of care.”
Sounds like another one of those callous private companies that only cares about profit, which we’ve all been taught is evil – only government can force people to be good and honest, right? The truth is that profitable companies are the ones that do a good job of providing health care. Government, which doesn’t have to turn a profit because it takes all its funding by force, is generally the agency that provides the most mediocre health care. I should know, I’ve received this type of mediocre care in the military. No choice, I just got whichever doctor was on duty, no matter how incompetent or bored they happened to be. Some of them were bored and incompetent. A few were pretty good. But I didn’t have a choice which ones I got. It was a crap shoot every time I needed treatment.
The key to this story is that New York City Health and Hospitals Corporation has a .gov web site – it’s a government agency. A bureaucracy. This lady died under the “care” of a government agency, the same kind of care you can expect when you vote for universal health care.
What is HHC?
The New York City Health and Hospitals Corporation (HHC) was created by New York State legislation in 1970 as a public benefit corporation, governed by a Board of Directors, to oversee the City’s public health care system in all five boroughs. The Corporation consists of 11 acute care hospitals, 6 Diagnostic and Treatment Centers, 4 long-term care facilities, a certified home health care agency, and more than 80 community health clinics, including Communicare Centers and Child Health Clinics. Through its wholly owned subsidiary, MetroPlus, HHC operates a Health Plan which enrolls members in Medicaid, Child Health Plus and Family Health Plus. HHC facilities treat nearly one-fifth of all general hospital discharges and more than one third of emergency room and hospital-based clinic visits in New York City.
Someone should ask Barack Obama or John McCain (who will play along with the idea of health funded by theft) why this lady who was being provided New York’s version of universal “health care” had to die on camera on the floor of a psychiatriac ward.
The inevitable clarion calls for more rules, more oversight and more bureaucrats will be heard because people are naturally horrified by such a lonely and undignified death. In ignorance, we will march one step closer to ultimate mediocrity in health care and our options will narrow just a little further. More people will go crazy as they realize that freedom of choice in America is just a pipe dream. Some of them will die while being prodded by the indifferent foot of a bureaucrat. The cold eye of a surveillance camera paid for with tax dollars stolen from that person while he or she was still sane will record the entire event, a silent witness to the involuntary downward spiral that happens in a society with too much government and not enough love to go around. We’ll find out what her name was, and we’ll vote for more cameras and more rule books and more petty authortarianism and then we’ll forget about the woman who died alone on a cold floor in a cold room in a city populated by more government employees per capita than almost any in the world. See your future if you can. Maybe I’m wrong, but I doubt it.