The following is an excerpt from OpinionJournal.com’s “Best of the Web” written by the editor, James Taranto.
The Mint Jelly Is Still on the Lamb
“German Police Investigate Kebab Sauce After Attack”–headline, Reuters, Oct. 16
Great Moments in Socialized Medicine
“The National Health Service has spent £1.5m [about $2.5 million] paying for hundreds of its staff to have private health treatment so they can leapfrog their own waiting lists,” London’s Sunday Times reports:
More than 3,000 staff, including doctors and nurses, have gone private at the taxpayers’ expense in the past three years because the queues at the clinics and hospitals where they work are too long.
Figures released under the Freedom of Information act show that NHS administrative staff, paramedics and ambulance drivers have also been given free private healthcare. This has covered physiotherapy, osteopathy, psychiatric care and counselling–all widely available on the NHS.
British health care, it seems, resembles American elementary and secondary education, in that the government has a monopoly but there is an expensive private opt-out–and many of those who run the monopoly avail themselves of the private system….
One wonders, though, don’t the NHS docs and other staffers read the New York Times? After all, as former Enron adviser Paul Krugman has noted, “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.
For more “Best of the Web” click here and look for the “Best of the Web Today” link in the middle column below “Today’s Columnists.
