When I hear a transatlantic voice here in England, I've learned to ask the owner if they are Canadian, rather than American. This is because I've noticed that Americans don't mind being mistaken for Canadians, but the opposite does not always apply.
The differences between the two are usually hard for us foreigners to spot, but occasionally, as with the situation with firearms and healthcare, it is obvious that there's definitely a case of "ne'er the twain shall meet" going on. A vestigal remnant of a previous empire, side by side with the currently dominant empire, make for interesting comparisons.
When Britain was busily plundering the known world, er... bringing civilisation to the ignorant ungrateful masses, I suspect our health service was also a bit patchy, but now we have sorted that out by having targets.
Targets are what you need.
We have a target that says a new arrival at hospital must be seen within a certain time, (good idea eh?) so if you are rushed to hospital with blood pouring out of your ears and your leg falling off, if you are shunted into a car park upon arrival it's because admitting you straight away would mean you'd have to wait too long IN the hospital, and you'd spoil the target. Waiting out in the car park, you have not officially arrived, and you'll be kept there until things have settled down in the waiting room. Don't worry though, you can wait as long as you like -- the ambulance doesn't cost you a penny!
This keeps the targets hunky-dory, and anyway, you shouldn't have been riding a motorcycle - don't you know that doctors refer to us as "Donors"?
Our local hospital is being investigated due to some monumental blunders coming reluctantly to light. I go daily to visit my step-father. I can tell you from experience that the purpose of a hospital is to sustain the largest possible number of administrative staff - if, as a consequence, you have to cut down on nurses to the extent that patients are not fed, watered or given bed-pans when needed you arrive at the situation I see daily - the ex-chief engineer of Texaco's biggest oil tanker being treated like a half-witted child as he waits to die in a room full of strangers.
Never mind, these new Trident nuclear submarines will put everything right again. Obviously.
We surely need to wake up to the reality that the needs of government are inimical to the needs of the individual, and that capitalism has no place in medicine.
In our current system the "ideal patient" is one who needs expensive life-long medication.
I see this as an inevitable result of basing healthcare on the profit motive, it also means that as an inevitable consequence, we educate our children in the art and science of making money.
Were our healthcare based on humanitarianism, we'd have to teach the kids something else.
Sunbeem.