Government run health care...

Please save us now. Nancy Pelosi is proposing Health Care legislation in the House that would have a government run option.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said the House this year will consider health-care legislation including an option for a government-run program that would compete with insurers.

“This is a big agenda, and I believe it should have a public option in it for it to be really substantial,” Pelosi told reporters at her weekly news conference in the U.S. Capitol.

President Barack Obama has said he wants Congress to produce legislation that would expand health-care coverage for the country’s 46 million uninsured and reduce medical costs. Republicans and some insurers have opposed the creation of a new program modeled on Medicare as part of the effort. The top Republican on the Senate Finance Committee, Senator Charles Grassley of Iowa, last week called the idea a “deal-breaker.”

I've asked this question to every person who thinks we should have a government run health care system. Name me one government run program that is run efficiently and properly? I can't think of one, can you? So why the Hell would we want the government running anything else.

Government Health Care at its finest

I guess this is what we can expect if Obama pushes through a National Health Care.

The British government apologised Wednesday after a damning official report into a hospital likened by one patient's relative to "a Third World" health centre.

Stafford Hospital in central England was found to have appalling standards of care, putting patients at risk and leading to some dying, according to a report on Tuesday.

Between 400 and 1,200 more people died than would have been expected in a three-year period at the National Health Service (NHS) hospital, according to an investigation by the Healthcare Commission watchdog.

"We do apologise to all those people who have suffered from the mistakes that have been made in the Stafford Hospital," said Prime Minister Gordon Brown, questioned on the matter at his weekly grilling in the House of Commons.

Receptionists with no medical training were left to to assess patients arriving at the hospital's accident and emergency department, the report found.

Julie Bailey, whose 86-year-old mother Bella died in the hospital in November 2007, said she and other family members slept in a chair at her bedside for eight weeks because they were so concerned about poor care.

"What we saw in those eight weeks will haunt us for the rest of our lives," said the 47-year-old. "We saw patients drinking out of flower vases they were so thirsty.

"There were patients wandering around the hospital and patients fighting. It was continuous through the night. Patients were screaming out in pain because you just could not get pain relief.

"It was like a Third World country hospital. It was an absolute disgrace.