Public health is a bottomless money pit.

Public health officials and senior administrators who blame today's problems on a lack of funding should be immediately ridiculed and shouted down.

They've had their funding provided at every turn in the past decade, as Australia and many other Western nations have poured funding into their public health systems. The NHS in Britain should scare people much more than America's so-called "free market" health system.

Via Reason Magazine comes this terrific article:

------------------------------------------------

It was the tragic case of 73-year-old Mavis Skeet, said the Tory-leaning Daily Telegraph, that "came to symbolize the crisis in the NHS" during the early Blair-Brown years. After having her cancer surgery cancelled five times—it was first scheduled for December 1998; it was cancelled a fifth time in January 2000—her condition was declared inoperable. She died in May 2000.

In January 2000, as the situation with the health service worsened, Blair appeared on David Frost’s morning program to declare that NHS spending was "too low" by European standards and a request a new infusion of cash to shore up the faltering system by adding doctors, nurses, and beds.

In a 2007 interview with the BBC (for the very good documentary "The Blair Years"), Blair acknowledged that around the time of Skeet’s death he was "receiving letters from people—heartbreaking letters—about people waiting for their heart operation, their husband or their relative, and dying on a waiting list because they couldn’t get treated quickly enough."