And the prognosis?
Hope you're sitting down...
The Guardian (UK):
Senior doctors warned that the findings reflected their increasingly frantic efforts to find beds for the growing number of emergency admissions and that repeated breaches of the 85% (capacity) limit meant that patients -esp. the elderly- are being scattered across hospitals.
A lack of beds in specialist wards results in patients being sent to wards where staff may not know how to look after them properly. Some operations are being cancelled because of this 'overspill'...
The NHS recognizes that occupancy rates >85% make it difficult to give high-quality care, minimize the risk of hospital-acquired infections, and avoid busy staff making mistakes with medication... (yet) occupancy averaged over 90% for 11/12 months.
...
Hospitals increasingly declare themselves on 'red alert', which means they have very few beds left- or 'black alert', when they have to shut their doors to new admissions and send patients elsewhere...
Senior doctors warned that the findings reflected their increasingly frantic efforts to find beds for the growing number of emergency admissions and that repeated breaches of the 85% (capacity) limit meant that patients -esp. the elderly- are being scattered across hospitals.
A lack of beds in specialist wards results in patients being sent to wards where staff may not know how to look after them properly. Some operations are being cancelled because of this 'overspill'...
The NHS recognizes that occupancy rates >85% make it difficult to give high-quality care, minimize the risk of hospital-acquired infections, and avoid busy staff making mistakes with medication... (yet) occupancy averaged over 90% for 11/12 months.
...
Hospitals increasingly declare themselves on 'red alert', which means they have very few beds left- or 'black alert', when they have to shut their doors to new admissions and send patients elsewhere...
Likewise for Obamacare: White House cost projections were always the stuff of fairy tales... for that reason -unlike many Republicans- I still think ObamaCare is doomed: it's a poorly written rush-job that was never even reconciled, and imo it will be very difficult to implement in anything like it's current form.
And 'finding out what's in it' isn't going to be anything like the Christmas morning scene Nancy Pelosi painted for us: besides plunging quality of care and death-panels, expect a renewed backlash to develop -particularly by small business owners- over the next year as premiums climb and the taxes really kick-in. Job creation will be obliterated, and Americans are going to turn on this wholly-unneeded nationalization of the US health-care system as reality hits.
PJ O'Rourke once said 'If you think health care is expensive now, wait until it's free'- indeed.
More specifically, we're talking $2.6 TRILLION and 800,000 jobs lost... this dog won't hunt, people.