"A world of shoddy practice, poor hygiene standards and a shocking disregard for patients' individual needs"

From The Wall Street Journal's Best of the Web Today:   Great Moments in Socialized Medicine The 1983 film "Monty Python's the Meaning of Life" opened with a scene in a British maternity ward, in which the hospital administrator is visiting and the doctor shows off the fancy "machine that goes 'ping' " while ignoring the patient, who lies off to the side on a gurney.   Actual maternity wards in Britain's National Health Service are even worse, former NHS staffer Verena Burns writes in London's Daily Mail: I longed to sit with this poor young woman, calm her and remind her gently to breathe deeply through each contraction. Just half an hour of my time could have made all the difference. Instead, I put on my cheeriest smile and followed hospital procedure. "Would you like a painkiller?" I asked. Ten hours later, after she had been drugged to the eyeballs to dull the pain, I heard she'd given birth. Her baby was healthy, but I knew I'd let her down. As I watched her being wheeled into the ward, I felt eaten up with guilt. She'd effectively been ignored from the moment she turned up until the moment she gave birth. Plonked on an antenatal ward until her time came, with no one to reassure her during what was most likely the most terrifying moment of her life. No woman should have to give birth in these conditions--let alone in a modern hospital with professional staff at hand. Welcome to the modern NHS maternity ward. A world of shoddy practice, poor hygiene standards and a shocking disregard for patients' individual needs. Every time we highlight a story about the NHS--almost always from British newspapers--former Enron adviser Paul Krugman weighs in with the same mantra: "In Britain, the government itself runs the hospitals and employs the doctors. We've all heard scare stories about how that works in practice; these stories are false."   We have to admit, we're beginning to think he may be wrong.

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