Adventures in Government-Run Health (S)care: How's This for Preexisting Conditions?

Rhetoric:

“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. Like every system, the National Health Service has problems, but over all it appears to provide quite good care …”
— Paul Krugman, NY Times, August 17, 2009

Reality:

Consider these three quotes about the U.K.’s NHS, provided by Phil Boehmke at the American Thinker:

“The health service was launched on a fallacy. First we were going to finance everything, cure the nation and then spending would drop. That fallacy has been exposed. Then there was a period when everybody thought the public could have whatever they needed on the health service—it was just a question of governmental will. Now we recognize that no country, even if they are prepared to pay the taxes, can supply everything.”
— Dr. David Owen, Labor Minister responsible for the day to day operations of Britain’s NHS, in the London Sunday Times

“For most of us, it is only when we join a year-long hospital waiting list, or have taken an injured child to a hospital casualty department on Sunday afternoon, that we realize just how threadbare and starved financially the service really is. Not only is there an acute shortage of resources, but the expertise and facilities that are available are all too often dispensed via a conveyor-belt system which can at times be positively inhuman.”
— Bernard Dixon, editor of Britain’s “New Scientist” magazine

This must come down to the decision that some shall be helped at the cost of others being permitted to die before they need to. The conflicts on this issue have only begun, but there can be no doubt that they will be fierce indeed when the Draconian nature of the alternatives is fully realized.
— Harry Schwartz, in an essay entitled “The Infirmity of British Medicine”

Yet we keep hearing from the Obamaniacs, Congressional Democrats, and their media sycophants that the British system is the envy of the world (Before the health (s)care bill passed, I got into a Facebook debate with a GovCare supporter who insisted that the British government-run system was far superior to America’s erstwhile system.

Whatever. Who are you going to believe, a leftist Obamarobot or your lying eyes? Funny how we never see Americans jumping across the pond by the thousands to sign up for treatment and medicine in U.K.; it always seems to be the other way around.

So now here we are, entering an era where our leaders have imposed, against its citizens’ will, a health “care” system that will be just as successful as the British system they evidently admire.

Oh, by the way, the three quotes about were all cited in a book called The Future That Doesn’t Work: Social Democracy’s Failures in Britain by R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr. …

… Copyright 1975. 

That’s right: Brits knew their system was an economic and human nightmare as far as 35 years ago! How’s that for preexisting conditions?

Welcome to the future, suckers.