QOTD

Conservative Cat:

The Democratic Party's rules for nominating a President are controversial, confusing, and biased toward the powerful. Consider that, and then try to imagine what would happen if these same people designed your health care system.

MORE:

Sunday's WaPo decried poor medical care provided to captured illegal immigrants before they're deported:

Osman's death is a single tragedy in a larger story of life, death and often shabby medical care within an unseen network of special prisons for foreign detainees across the country. Some 33,000 people are crammed into these overcrowded compounds on a given day, waiting to be deported or for a judge to let them stay here.

The medical neglect they endure is part of the hidden human cost of increasingly strict policies in the post-Sept. 11 United States and a lack of preparation for the impact of those policies. . .

The most vulnerable detainees, the physically sick and the mentally ill, are sometimes denied the proper treatment to which they are entitled by law and regulation. They are locked in a world of slow care, poor care and no care, with panic and coverups among employees watching it happen, according to a Post investigation.

The investigation found a hidden world of flawed medical judgments, faulty administrative practices, neglectful guards, ill-trained technicians, sloppy record-keeping, lost medical files and dangerous staff shortages. It is also a world increasingly run by high-priced private contractors. There is evidence that infectious diseases, including tuberculosis and chicken pox, are spreading inside the centers. . .

Nurses who work on the front lines see the problems up close. "Dogs get better care in the dog pound," said Catherine Rouse, a contract nurse at an Arizona detention center who quit after two months last year because she saw what she regarded as "scary medicine" in the prison: patients taken off medications they needed and nurses doing tasks they were not qualified to do. "You don't treat people like that. There has to be some kind of moral fiber," Rouse said.

The WaPo story was intended as another Bush Administration exposé. This misses the real message, as Right Wing News' John Hawkins observes:

So what happens when the government takes over YOUR CARE and "Dogs get better care in the dog pound?" What happens when all of us, except the richest people who can go elsewhere, are stuck in a "system teetering on collapse."

Liberals can promise anything that they want, but what you just read is the reality of what happens when you put an organization as incompetent as the federal government in charge of health care.

(via Wolf Howling)