The People Who Brought You AIG and the Housing Crisis Want To Run Your Health Care. A Cautionary Tale From England, Where the Future Is Now.

Gordon Brown has apologized after an investigation showed that the British National Health Service-run Stafford Hospital was so abyssmally bad that patients drank water out of flowerpots and that too many died in squalor or agony as untrained and undermanned staff were forced to meet “targets” instead of providing the care they advertised. Brown claimed these were “isolated” incidents.

The commission’s report - revealed in yesterday’s Daily Mail - said at least 400 deaths could not be explained, although it is feared up to 1,200 patients may have died needlessly.

Speaking to MPs at Prime Minister’s Questions in the Commons, Mr Brown said: “We do apologise to all those people who have suffered from the mistakes that have been made in the Stafford hospital.”

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Any system, whether public or private, is made up of people. The circumstance that it has to work; that it should work; or that it must work is irrlevant. It won’t work unless it is made to work. Just look at how well Dodd, Geithner and Obama have been managing the financial crisis. If they were doctors in charge of a patient’s life, how much better would they do?