Line o' the Day: When is a fatality a convenience? When you're in the UK

 
Don Surber quotes Charles Moore, a UK columnist on the British health care system.

Each new patient is just an added cost and each dead patient is an administrative convenience. The NHS is, with our state school system, the last major survival in this country of the idea of the 1940s that government can decide what is best for us and make sure that it is done... A colleague of mine, who investigated alternative healthcare systems when the extreme dirtiness of many British hospitals first became an issue, went to France to compare. In hospital after hospital, he found floors so clean that you could have eaten your lunch off them. Did the Health Minister order them to clean them, he asked an administrator. He was met with a look of incredulity. “Of course not. We run ourselves. Patients have a choice of hospital. If they do not choose us, we get no money. No hospital can survive if it is not clean.”

In France, hospitals compete. In the UK, people die because there is no competition. Go ye therefore hence, and read it all.