The right to wait

Sweden's socialized healthcare is sometimes used as an example that America should follow. It proves that you can get good care for everybody. Does it?

In the Swedish media there has been one report after another of people not getting any healthcare at all. In fact, they do not even get an ambulance.

Let me give you one example:

"Help me," 23-year-old Emil Linnell can be heard saying repeatedly in recordings of his January 30th call to SOS Alarm, Sweden's emergency response service...

The transcript of the communication between the nurse and the man shows that he pleaded ‘help me’ repeatedly on the phone to SOS Alarm but was ignored.

According to the transcript the nurse said he couldn’t really understand what Linnell’s problem was. He said that Linnell was ‘running about the flat’ with no ‘apparent problem breathing or speaking’.

But Linnell persisted in saying he couldn’t breathe.

“I know, but I have been sitting here listening to you. You are breathing fine now,“ the nurse answered.

“No, I am fainting! I’m fainting,” he said.

“Take a deep breath now,” the nurse urged.

“I can’t! Please help me! Please! Help me,“ pleaded Linnell.

A little later he said, “I can’t breathe” again.

“You are breathing fine. I promise you,” the nurse then answered him.

The call then finished with a wheezing noise followed by a crash. Two hours later a neighbour found Linnell dead by the open door.

No ambulance was ever sent, and it was later determined Linnell died from a ruptured spleen.

This is not an isolated event. We read about these things all the time:

A Swedish woman died in hospital after being forced to call for an ambulance four times, according to a report filed with the National Board of Health and Welfare... Sweden's emergency response service SOS Alarm has recently been put under review by the health board following a man's death after he was refused an ambulance and a series of other recent cases deemed to endanger the welfare of patients.

One more:

After sustaining an open chest wound of 10cm long while trimming her horse’s mane, Sweden’s emergency response services refused to send an ambulance, suggesting the 11-year-old girl take aspirin instead...

The mother phoned SOS Alarm, the government-backed primary emergency response service, and described the child as shaking because she was in so much pain. She requested an ambulance because she did not have immediate access to a car.

The responding nurse refused the dispatch.

Instead she advised the mother to clean the wound, apply pressure and give her daughter aspirin which would give them eight hours to get to the nearest hospital, according to SvD.

Another one:

A woman from northern Sweden died after four calls placed over a four day period requesting to have an ambulance sent to her home in Timrå were ignored.

"She was having trouble breathing. She was instructed to call the healthcare information hotline and there they thought she sounded irritated," the young woman's mother told the local Sundsvalls Tidningen.

Following her daughter's death, the mother has had the transcripts of her daughter's conversations with emergency service operator SOS Alarm read to her.

The mother told the newspaper that healthcare representatives have since told her that her daughter's first call for an ambulance was denied because she "was still communicating verbally".

"That's totally insane. If you can't communicate verbally, you can't call for an ambulance anyway," another close relative told the newspaper.

Let us say you actually get an ambulance. Now everything will be fine, right? Wrong:

Around 3,000 people die every year in Sweden because of deficient patient safety, according to two leading doctors...

The authors argue that medical mistakes cost Swedish society between 60 and 100 billion kronor per year ($9.6 – 16 billion).

Engkvist and Ljungblad highlight several recent cases, including the death of an infant to an overdose of painkillers, two elderly patients who died after their blood poisoning was misdiagnosed as the stomach flu, as well as the case of ambulance drivers who took a lunch break instead of responding to a call.

The patient, who was having trouble breathing, died.

"Unfortunately, these cases are probably just the tip of the iceberg," according the authors, who lament that individual cases rarely lead to any widespread debate about patient safety because it takes so long for the National Board of Health and Welfare (Social Styrelsen) to process the cases.

Considering that 355 Swedes died in car accidents in 2009, this suggests that if you survive a car accident, you might want to stay away from the hospital.

What is the cause of these stories? The cause is the rationing. Why the rationing? Since the healthcare is "free", there are no incentives for people to think about the cost of healthcare. To keep the costs under control, to make sure they stay within the collective healthcare budget, they have to ration.

In Sweden our politicians brag about the public healthcare system. It is, allegedly, one of the best in the world. They also know that socialists, such as Michael Moore in the USA, greatly admires the European model that Sweden represent. Yet the same politicians do their very best to keep people from ever entering a hospital. Why? Because even though healthcare is a "right" and is "free", it costs a great deal of money.

So if you have a problem you will be advised by the politicians to call a nurse on the healthcare "hotline". Why bother showing up at the hospital if you really do not need any care, right?

The nurse is now suppose to diagnose and advise you over the phone. If you, however, fail to describe your concerns clearly enough then you might actually help her to misdiagnose yourself (or a loved one). The joke will be on you, the next day when you call for an ambulance. Which might never show up. If it ever does show up, or you somehow manage to get to the hospital on your own, then baffled doctors at the hospital will tell you that you should have come to the hospital the first day. Believe it or not. They might even ask you: "Why didn't you call for an ambulance?"

Now your condition is very critical. Will you make it through the night? Nobody knows.

The right to healthcare does not mean you will ever get any healthcare. That is a myth. In the immoral attempt to make healthcare a "right", to make it "free" for everybody, it has instead become less and less available for everybody.

This is not a "coincidence". This is the logical consequence of the very nature of socialized healthcare, just as the lack of food, housing, energy, cars, clothes - as well as anything remotely resembling a human life - is the logical consequence of socialism in general.

There is a small but growing minority who can get past the worst waiting lines for healthcare, namely those who can afford a private healthcare insurance - in addition to the taxes you have to pay for the public healthcare system.

While you are laying there, in the hospital bed, unable to get some sleep you tell yourself: "It isn't fair". You have paid insanely high taxes all your life to get access to this "free" healthcare that you allegedly have a "right" to. Then you suddenly remember somebody telling you that "Everyone is equal before death". You start to feel a bit better. You can finally sleep. Unfortunately the doctors are unable to wake you up the next day. The overworked night staff failed to notice that your ECG machine did not work properly.

Is this how you want to end up? Yet this can be your fate. Socialized medicine is, after all, the moral ideal according to the left. Obamacare is merely the first step.

The leftists used to deny that socialized healthcare would result in rationing. Nowadays they admit it does and has to. But it does not seem to bother them. On the contrary. Now, believe it or not, the rationing is a moral "selling point", since it means that the healthcare access - or, rather, the lack of it - will be more equal.