Great Moments in Universal Healthcare

John Kerry wants this for you by 2012:

AN NHS hospital has been penalised for treating people too quickly after its local trusts refused to pay the £2.5m cost of clearing a backlog of patients.

Ipswich Hospital had been so successful in reducing its waiting lists that it was able to meet current demand for treatment almost immediately.

However, the acceleration of treatment breached rules set by the Suffolk East Primary Care Trusts (PCTs), which stated that patients must wait at least 122 days, to ensure that its own resources were not exhausted too quickly.

The Government has set tough national targets in an attempt to get hospitals to cut long waiting lists, and the Department of Health rules state that no patient should wait for more than six months for an operation.

Emphasis mine. Yeah, gimme that old-time socialized medicine. Slipped disc? Don't worry, just lay there for another four months and we'll get to it. Hernia? Early 2007 is looking good.

This situation is a microcosm of what is wrong with socialism, efficiency is detrimental to the overall goal. Finding a better, faster way to do things is a negative.

We saw it with the Soviet Union and we're seeing it with this program. The ability to streamline an operation and make it run at peak efficiency is met with fines in Britain while it would be hailed as an excellent model in America.