Your hospital on socialism

Unsurprising news from Britain:

Senior hospital doctors were told to send patients home as soon as possible, free up beds and cancel planned operations after a “code black” emergency was declared by a health board due to a shortage of nurses.

NHS Grampian issued the alert this month in a move that raises wider concerns about staffing levels in Scotland.

An urgent email was sent to staff at the health board saying “there are many more patients in the hospital than we have beds for” but more wards could not be opened because of a lack of nurses to staff them. ...

Three years ago surgeons in NHS Grampian warned that bed reductions in general surgery and vascular surgery departments would have serious consequences for patients. They compiled a report that said if the proposals went ahead it would “not be possible to deliver an adequate service to any other than emergency patients”. ...

One of the surgeons sounding the alarm three years ago said there is an “ongoing tension between people who are delivering clinical services and managers who are trying to meet the budget”.

Meaning that the argument is over rationing of health care: who gets it, how much and when. The Grampian system of the National Health Service, btw, is one of the wealthiest in Scotland. " The region is sometimes seen as a “warning light” for the whole of the Scottish NHS... ."

Just remember: health care is always going to be rationed in some way. Our choice is not not "whether" but only how.

And curiously related to the health crisis is the housing market in Dublin, Ireland, where, "The government has been blamed for the latest surge in house prices, which rose by 10.7 per cent in the past year."

Fianna Fáil described the double-digit increase as “alarming news” and called for an independent review of the government’shelp-to-buy scheme, which it warned was pushing prices up.

“There is little point having a help-to-buy scheme for first-time buyers if its only impact on the ground is to lead to unsustainable house price increases right across the country, as is now clearly the case,” Barry Cowen, the party’s housing spokesman, said. ...

Mr McCartney said that the government’s policies needed to be questioned.

“I think government policy got it wrong, but not catastrophically wrong,” he said.

“It’s many people’s view that this current bout of house price inflation could have been avoided if they had addressed the cost side, in other words try to stimulate development by reducing development costs rather than increasing the price of houses.”

What a concept - the government should stop trying to mandate and control commerce and markets and instead deregulate capital-sucking development burdens.