Great Moments in Socialized Medicine
“A mentally ill, suicidal teenager was ferried around for hours by an ambulance crew because no NHS [National Health Service] unit would accept her,” reports the BBC:

[A paramedic] wrote that the first hospital they took her to, believed to be the main psychiatric hospital in Ipswich, St Clements, “declined to accept the patient as she was a juvenile” so the ambulance was diverted to the local juvenile psychiatry facility.

They were unable to accept the patient as the staff were on an “away day”, the memo reports. It is understood this facility would not have been the agreed “place of safety” for such a patient anyway.

The receptionist suggested they contact someone from the Child and Adolescent Mental Health Service nearby.

When the crew got there, they were told the patient could not be accepted.

Another unit was suggested, but this would not be open until four days later.

The patient was then taken to A&E at Ipswich Hospital, but the crew was again told the patient could not be accepted there because she had been sectioned under the Mental Health Act.

The paramedic said: “As there was no alternative available, we had to convey the patient to the police cells as a place of safety. This was the wrong environment for this sick and vulnerable child.”

A Suffolk Police custody log confirmed the girl was kept in the cells for six hours between 1700 GMT and 2300 GMT.

None of this would have happened if the paramedics had listened to former Enron adviser Paul Krugman: “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.”