A WARNING FROM BRITAIN - AT 10:33 A.M. ET:  Reader Tom Wharton alerts us to a piece in London's Telegraph, warning of what Britain's National Health Service has become:

One of Labour's great triumphs with the National Health Service is that people now go into hospital to die rather than to be cured. It seems to render the whole debate about assisted suicide utterly pointless. Who needs a Dignitas clinic when you can check into a hospital in Basildon and be relatively certain to be taken out in a box?

And...

This exposes one of the great pretences of the NHS: that it is there first and foremost for the benefit of patients. It isn't. It exists these days mostly for the benefit of various trade unionists who are fully paid-up members of the Brown clientele, and who earn good money as petty bureaucrats trying to "manage" things that, if they need to be managed at all, could be far better done by fewer people in much more efficient systems.

COMMENT:  And yet, that is the system that the most vocal elements of the Democratic Party aim for, and they do so without apology.  They believe we can do what Britain has not been able to do, and what other nations do poorly - make a national health system work well for the critically ill.

Why do they dream the things they dream?  Because this is what they've been taught, by an increasingly ideological educational system, by a breathtakingly shallow knowledge of foreign countries, and by partisans in the press.

November 28,  2009