Britains NHS is a model for what americans can expect if Oscumbocare/tax is not repealed.

The International Olympic Committee
decided not to include in the opening ceremony a moment of silence to
honor the eleven Israeli athletes killed by Palestinian gunmen during
the 1972 games in Munich. That move drew the ire of NBC’s Bob Costas.
During Friday’s ceremony, he commented that, although a private moment
of silence was held before a mere 100 people this week at the Athlete’s
Village, “for many, tonight, with the world watching, is the true time
and place to remember those who were lost and how and why they died.”

Instead, the Olympic ceremony featured a weird, politically correct extravaganza by film director Danny Boyle (Slumdog Millionaire). It was hailed by the sports website The Roar with the headline “London 2012: Most political Olympics opening ceremony since Berlin 1936.” The 1936 games, of course, were an infamous propaganda exercise for Adolf Hitler.

For The Roar’s Spiro Zanos, “the political message at London
was that Britain could recover its greatness and become Great Britain
once again if . . . [it] re-embraced the radical politics that unleashed
the industrial revolution and the welfare state. . . . If this means
having the most political opening ceremony since the Berlin Olympics in
1936, then so be it.” The state-worship so ably skewered by Jonah
Goldberg in Liberal Fascism is alive and well.

Left-wingers were thrilled. “Brilliant that we got a socialist to do
the opening ceremony,” tweeted Alastair Campbell, former communications
chief for the Labour party. Boyle denied he was promoting a political
agenda. “The sensibility of the show is very personal,” he told
reporters. “We had no agenda other than . . . values that we feel are
true.” At a news conference beforehand, he explained that one of the
reasons he “put the NHS in the show is that everyone is aware of how
important NHS is to everybody in the country. One of the core values of
our society is that it doesn’t matter who you are, you will get treated
the same in terms of health care.”

Can anyone seriously believe that? Sunday’s British papers report
that a study by the research firm Lloyd’s TSB Premier Banking found that
nearly two-thirds of Britons earning more than $78,700 a year have
taken out private health insurance because they don’t trust the NHS. A
survey by the British health-care organization Bupa found that
two-thirds of its customers cited the risk of infection from superbugs
as a top reason for buying private insurance. Shaun Matisonn, the chief
executive of PruHealth, says that “patients today are sophisticated
consumers of health care. They research the treatments they want, but
cannot always get them through the NHS.”

Horror stories about the NHS abound. A 2007 survey of almost 1,000 physicians by Doctors’ Magazine
found that two-thirds said they had been told by their local NHS trust
not to prescribe certain drugs, and one in five doctors knew patients
who had suffered as a result of treatment rationing. The study cited one
physician who characterized the NHS as “a lottery.” A new study this
year by GP magazine supports that conclusion. Through Freedom
of Information Act records, it found that 90 percent of NHS trusts were
rationing care.

Rick Dewsbury of the Daily Mail was aghast at the worship of
the NHS during Friday’s Olympic ceremony. The columnist noted the sheer
hypocrisy of the spectacle, as “the majority of the athletes taking
part in the Games
will have access to the most expensive cutting-edge private treatment
available in the world for even the slightest graze on their bodies.”

Dewsbury recounted the 2009 case of Kane Gorny, a 22-year-old NHS
patient. Gorny was admitted to the hospital for a hip replacement. A
series of hospital employees refused his request for a glass of water
and failed to give him diabetes medication. He went so far as to call
the emergency operator for help. When the police arrived, nurses assured
them that Gorny was confused and needed no outside help. A day later,
he was dead of dehydration. The official inquest into his death was
published this month. It found that neglect by hospital staff — “a
cascade of individual failures” — contributed to his death. Here’s
hoping that not everyone is “treated the same” in Britain’s NHS
hospitals.

In Britain, we have seen what could be our future, and it’s not a pretty sight.