Socialized Medicine in England

It’s always fun to fact-check Paul Krugman. His sense of reality is so defective, it does not take very much effort.

You recall a statement he made when he was arguing for nationalizing or Obamacizing health care in America:

In Britain, the government itself runs the hospitals and employs the doctors. We’ve all heard scare stories about how that works in practice; these stories are false.

Krugman believes in giving more power to bureaucrats and taking more power away from the free market. It doesn't matter what the problem is. His solution is always more taxes and more spending.

To fact-check his statement—it has been done, here and elsewhere, over and over again—we turn to the Daily Mail. The paper reports on a study of the condition in the Emergency Room (called A & E, that is, Accident and Emergency) in one of Britain’s best hospitals.

The Daily Mail reports:

These are the shocking scenes inside the A&E unit of one of the country's top-performing hospitals.

At one point last week there were 95 seriously ill patients waiting to be seen but only 33 beds.

Mothers sat on the floor with their babies on their laps while the elderly queued up on trolleys and in wheelchairs.

Managers at the Royal Blackburn hospital in Lancashire have even resorted to appointing designated 'corridor nurses' to take care of all the patients waiting without a bed. 

Doctors say they are 'taking too many risks' by sending patients home early, and nurses report conditions as 'dangerous' and 'frightening'. 

The images were filmed by the BBC last Sunday and Monday after it was granted special access by the hospital's chief executive Kevin McGee.

Of course, the BBC and the Labour Party is happy to share these results. They believe that it can all be solved by throwing more money into the system. They do not tell us whether there are enough physicians and nurses available. They do not tell us where the money is going to come from.

When socialist schemes fail, the solution is always to tax more and to throw money at the problem. Good luck with that.