After all the myriad revelations concerning the collapsing British “National Health Service” (NHS), one might imagine things couldn’t get any more brazenly absurd for sick folks trying to purchase good medical care in the UK.
But -- of course! --they have.
Now, the North Bristol NHS Trust is ready to implement its new “Red Card to Racism” policy. And what might that catchy title imply?
If you guessed a “soccer/football” modeled system to deny service to patients deemed by NHS bureaucrats as having used language the government doesn’t like, you just scored.
Under the scheme, any patient abusing staff would be challenged and warned, leading to a 'sports-style disciplinary yellow card' followed by a final red card in which treatment would be 'withdrawn as soon as is safe'.
And who wouldn’t be thrilled to have tons of his or her cash extracted by the state to fund a system that gives itself the power to deny medical care to said same taxpayer for things he or she might say?
The abusive behavior covers racist or sexist language, gestures or behavior.
(North Bristol) Trust chief executive Andrea Young said they wanted staff to 'challenge and report it'.
And before anyone take an unnecessary turn down “sounds reasonable road”, consider a number of facts.
First, even if a patient considers something “reasonable”, the final definition of that term is left in the hands of agents of the state.
Second. The definitions of “abusive” behavior, “racist or sexist language, gestures or behavior” are also left up to the all-powerful, ever-so-trustworthy government.
So, as Luis Miguel of The New American observes:
In a highly publicized case from 2017, a female NHS patient complained when she requested a female nurse to carry out a cervical smear only for the hospital to send a person with ‘an obviously male appearance … close-cropped hair, a male facial appearance and voice, large number of tattoos and facial stubble.’ When the patient pointed out what she believed to be a mistake, the nurse replied, “My gender is not male. I’m a transsexual.’
In other words, a patient complaining that she’s being gynecologically examined by a pirate in drag could, according to the North Bristol NHS Trust Website, be cited with not just a “Yellow Flag”, but a “Red Flag” and denied “service”.
How quaint. That would be “service” for which her taxes have been seized for years -- upon threat of her being thrown in jail for non-payment.
Indeed, the vagueness of the North Bristol “Red Card” policy could mean that even Britishers who are proud of their socialistic British system could run into trouble.
Wait. What?
In 2017, for example, University Hospitals Bristol NHS Foundation Trust ordered the removal of the British flag from the stab vests of security personnel because the national banner was deemed 'offensive.'
So. Hold on. The state-run system is so screwed-up that it could ban people for wearing the state flag?
Somewhere, the Monty Python team members must be watching this and wondering if the political class in England is trying to write new skits for them.
After all, this is the same medical system that, because it operates under the “we all pay” concept of forced collectivism, in 2017 mandated that if those grunting, troglodytic obese people in the patient caste wanted elective surgeries, they’d have to lose weight.
It’s the same system that in 2016 was exposed for trying to hide the fact that it was going to close clinics because it was so incapable of controlling expenses.
This is the collectivist system that was caught denying life-sustaining hydration and food to terminally ill patients in what was called the “Liverpool Pathway” – a system that, perhaps, Obamacare co-creator Ezekiel Emanuel, brother to former Chicago Mayor and Clinton/Obama pal Rahm, might like, since he helped incorporate “Best Practices” panels into Obamacare to do essentially the same thing.
Gotta love those fans of euthanasia, ‘cause they’re all for the “greater good” of course.
And this is the NHS that recently fired a doctor because he would not conform to their speech dictates. He would not call people male when they were not, and he would not call people female when they were not. He stuck with science and truth, and the state will ban truth when it gets in the way of the state’s goals.
One of the most striking things about the inevitable implosion of the collectivist UK health system begun in 1947 is that so many Brits still cling to it as something good, when reality screams at them to wake up.
The second is that the socialist UK system (there is still a tiny private market that handles roughly 10.5 percent of cases) offers a prime lesson in how the “Tragedy of the Commons” becomes an ouroboros – a snake that eats its own tail. Since the system is touted as “care for all”, it isn’t supposed to deny care for anyone and is supposed to be “inclusive”. But this “inclusiveness” causes over-utilization of services by the public, who, if they were paying out-of-pocket, would shop more wisely and husband their resources. It also destroys the competitive market in health care that would drive down costs for all. Instead, costs are driven up, and a system that was once portrayed as “for all” then has to apply capitations and payment limits on services, even, as mentioned earlier, going so far as to hide its financial ruin and use aborted babies as human fuel for heat.
If there were any more appropriate image to analogize collectivism, I cannot think of one.
Now, even the speech doctors and patients use could see them fired or denied service, because a system that is supposed to cater to all cannot do so without offending some, and it must, inevitably produce government controls over everything, including speech.
This is a warning to Americans not only about health care -- which has already been mostly turned into a collectivist, semi-fascistic, government-mandated, corporatized, politicized system even when people are trying to use “private” coverage outside Obamacare – but about how important it is to know the difference between private property and public property.
From government mandates that private store owners create “genderless” bathrooms, to bans on smoking in private eateries, many people in the US simply accept the idea that politicians can tell private business owners how to run their establishments. And that’s because, since 1946, and a terrible Supreme Court ruling in the case called “Marsh v Alabama”, the feds have defined private property open for business as de jure “public” property. In “Marsh”, a ship-building company that owned and ran its own village of Chicksaw for employees to stay close to their work asked a woman handing out religious pamphlets to leave the property because she was trespassing. The police were called. She was removed.
But the US Supreme Court ruled that the Gulf Shipbuilding Corporation had created in Chicksaw a “public square”, and, as a result, the court set the unctuous precedent that private property owners would no longer being able to control their own property as they saw fit. Subsequently, the 1964 Civil Rights Act included in it the affront to private property called the “Public Accommodations” portion, which, in statutory form, explicitly spelled out the erroneous Supreme Court notion and applied it as so-called “law”.
But Natural Law clearly spells out the difference between private property – owned by an individual – and public property – claimed by the state, and on which taxpayer cash is used.
All of the problems of the NHS stem from the fact that theirs is not a private system. And now, the collectivism is so unworkable, even speech is being controlled.
People many not think that the US would ever go that far. But history shows, the path has already been set.