Once Again, Capitalism Saves the World

When Michael Moore wants to drop a few pounds he usually just pays someone to use Photoshop to stick his head on the body of a smaller fat guy.  Other than that he pays hundreds of thousands of dollars to go to the world’s most exclusive fat farm resorts.  However, if you’re a nurse in the socialist medical utopia of the UK, you just let the taxpayers pick up the bill.

Overweight nurses are to get personal trainers and high street vouchers to encourage them to lose weight.

More than 200 NHS staff are being equipped with pedometers and offered motivational fitness coaches to help them slim down.

They have been promised £20 of high street store vouchers if they manage to keep the weight off during the year-long pilot.

But here comes the best part.  Are you ready?  Make sure you’re sitting down, because this is awesome.

The £250,000 scheme at Birmingham East and North Primary Care Trust is being run by American healthcare company Humana, which wants to roll the programme out across Britain.

That’s right, folks!  The compassionate, free governmental fantasyland of the UK is turning to an evil, greedy, for-profit, heartless capitalist American company to get their lard-ass nurses to drop weight. 

My God, it’s almost as if socialism doesn’t work, and the free market provides solutions that government either cannot or will not!  Who could have ever imagined such a thing?

Dead Baby Jokes

You know that wonderful medical utopia in the UK, where everyone gets all the super duper magical free healthcare they could ever need, and it’s paid for by fairies and unicorns?  Well, it’s killing babies.

A devastating report on the state of Britain’s maternity services has concluded that they put the lives of women and their babies at risk.

The first national inquiry into maternity care by the Healthcare Commission, the NHS watchdog, has revealed a critical shortage of midwives, obstetricians absent from wards, a lack of beds and poor continuity of care. These have contributed to high death rates in some units and threaten the long-term health of mothers and their babies in others.

The inquiry, which is the largest ever carried out, involved all 150 NHS maternity units in England. It was triggered by separate full-scale investigations conducted at three trusts where mothers and babies died, which revealed failings indicative of a national pattern.

The three trusts were Northwick Park Hospital in Harrow, where 10 mothers died between 2002 and 2005, New Cross in Wolverhampton, where three babies died in two months in 2003, and Ashford & St Peters in Surrey, where there was a series of serious incidents in 2000 and 2001.

The Healthcare Commission said the root cause of poor performance was weak leadership by managers and medical staff. Many trusts were critically short of midwives, with numbers ranging from 40 per 1,000 births in the best-staffed trusts to 25 per 1,000 in the worst.

Only two-thirds of trusts had a consultant present on their wards for 40 hours a week – the basic safety standard laid down by the Royal College of Obstetricians. The study also revealed a five-fold variation in the number of consultants among trusts, from 3.3 to 0.6 per 1,000 births. In some trusts this meant consultants were present on the wards for just 10 hours a week.

More than £660m was paid out by NHS trusts in the three years to 2007 in negligence cases for obstetric claims – enough to hire 1,000 extra consultant obstetricians. Maternity services account for one in 10 requests to the Healthcare Commission to investigate particular trusts. Today’s report, which included surveys of 5,000 staff and 26,000 mothers, says nine out of 10 mothers rated their care as good. But it said there were “significant weaknesses”, with wide variations in standards between trusts. Many of the problems identified in earlier investigations were widespread, suggesting that NHS trusts are not giving maternity services priority. Sir Ian Kennedy, chairman of the commission, said: “I don’t ever again want to be reading another report into high death rates at a maternity unit.”

It’s worth noting that this report comes from The Independent, one of Britain’s leftie papers.  Ah, socialism.  Guaranteeing the same equal level of misery and shitty treatment for everyone.  (Except of course the rich, who can avoid the whole socialist disaster altogether by paying for private care themselves.)