Some unaware and entitled tourist from England did something really stupid. She took a selfie in a place in which it was possible to accidentally fall 33 feet onto jagged rocks. And then she fell 33 feet onto jagged rocks.
Where was she? Montenegro. Montenegro is a special place when it comes to healthcare. As one of the breakaway republics of former Yugoslavia, it has long known what government medicine has looked like.
Rather than pussy-footing around the issue, the communist lands have experimented with decades of full-fledged government medicine. If you ever want to see where the Democrats and their Republican accomplices will lead you one day with Medicare, Obamacare, and Bush’s Medicare Part D, just stop into a government hospital in the former Eastern Bloc.
After her fall, Jenny Birch-Morgan, 61, complains about her experience in such a hospital. She actually had it good — she survived and she was mostly left alone to heal. That’s probably the best you can ask for in such a situation where the government runs the hospitals and has done so for decades.
All kinds of defenders of the garbage government medicine schemes will sing you a different swan song. They have never been a patient in a hospital with more than half a century of hard economic times and more than half a century of total government control over the industry and economy. Even in these post-communist times, the awful effects of the communist years remain. Prosperity is hard to achieve and easy to destroy.
Here are some insightful quotes from the article:
“‘I could not move my body, yet they refused to treat me, to wash me, I was scared to ask for help,’ lamented Birch-Morgan of her alleged mistreatment, which she claims involved her being left sitting in her blood and feces for a week.”
“And that was only the tip of the iceberg. ‘I would call out for water, and they just pretended not to hear me, or understand me,’ the embattled Brit told the Sun. ‘I had to get someone to smuggle the water in for me.’”
“Food, meanwhile, allegedly entailed one piece of stale bread each morning, which nurses unknowingly put on a table where she couldn’t reach it due to her incapacitated state. As the staff hadn’t conducted any scans, they didn’t realize that Birch-Morgan had fractured her vertebrae and was therefore almost immobile. To make matters worse, the patient wasn’t administered any painkillers the whole time.”
This begs the question of where her daughter was through all of this and what kind of daughter she raised that couldn’t be bothered to carry a piece of bread over to her mother.
“She believed that her poor treatment was due to the hospital’s anti-Western sentiment, claiming: ‘They weren’t abusive, but they were definitely anti-British — I just felt like an alien.’ Not to mention that Montenegro has “the most backward health system in Europe,” according to a 2016 report by the Swedish nongovernmental organization Health Consumer Powerhouse.”
No, anti-British sentiment wasn’t the only source of her treatment, nor was it the fact that she was probably an entitled brat about it all, it also had to do with the system that she was in. Nothing bad will ever happen to the people working in that hospital. They will have jobs there as long as they want them, and taxpayers will forever pay for those jobs. There is no incentive to do anything else. In fact, the more developed countries of Europe are likely to encourage more government funding for that failing hospital and failing system rather than letting those parasitical entities die the prompt deaths they deserve.
You may call it the worst hospital system in Europe. I call it — the future that the Western public continues to vote for. We saw a snapshot of it during Covid. Combine heartless government, heartless medical system, and heartless doctor and your chances are grim.
Those who think otherwise are deluding themselves.
Examples abound around the globe and right here at home. The semblance of freedom and prosperity that this generation enjoys has residual benefit on what is, with few exceptions, a government run medical sector in the US. That residual benefit will not last forever.
Am I being a jerk about this? Yeah. You’ve got to be. There is zero reason to be nice about anyone advocating for government medicine after the Ides of March 2020. The medical system killed hundreds of thousands on the United States and insisted that many of them be left alone to die.
What are the solutions to our healthcare woes: immediate prohibition on government involvement in that industry, a free market, and pay for your treatment yourself. A century ago Americans had this figured out. Somehow with the improvement in medical technology we were sold the stupid idea of letting the government run that industry. That is a certain formula for higher prices (which we have) and worse care (which we have).
My solution presented above, is, in every industry in which it has been tried, a solution for lower prices and gradients of care based on the available funding. The thing is that more expensive care in medicine does not equal better care. Sometimes what you really need is low cost care and not much interference from a meddling doctor trying to solve every single thing instead of letting your body do it’s thing.
What exactly does that shift toward freedom look like? I don’t exactly know. I can’t predict the future. No one can, which is one reason why a marketplace does so well — rather than a small central committee, there are an uncountable number of people trying out an uncountable number of ideas to see what works. And even if I can’t predict the future, I know this much: where you get government out of the picture and allow consumer and entrepreneur to interact, you end up with some pretty amazing solutions.
Each one of us is empowered as consumer, as potential employee, even as potential entrepreneur, to encourage greater freedom around us.
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