Enron advisor Paul Krugman has this to say about English health care:
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.
Reality says this:
British man dies of dehydration in hospital.
A man of 22 died in agony of dehydration after three days in a leading teaching hospital.
Kane Gorny was so desperate for a drink that he rang police to beg for their help.
They arrived on the ward only to be told by doctors that everything was under control.
The next day his mother Rita Cronin found him delirious and he died within hours.
She said nurses had failed to give him vital drugs which controlled fluid levels in his body. ‘He was totally dependent on the nurses to help him and they totally betrayed him.’
Of course, Krugman himself has admitted that he lives in two alternative universes, so this may not be contradictory in his eyes. Apparently, nothing is.
For What It's Worth 
Stuff like this doesn’t only happen in the UK, it can and does happen here. The nursing profession is being in-sourced, as I understand it, with Filipino nurses being brought in at lower wages. Gotta be careful with nurses, anyway. Some can be very unsympathetic.
Stay out of the hospital. Or, if you must go, have a relative to attend you if possible.
Real answer to hc quality question is where retired GS (or major HF) partners in London or Frankfurt or Geneva travel for any serious stuff like heart disease, cancer, etc
Most pre-retirement GS or HF partners are 30-45yo so often have deminimus hc needs
What Krugman II doesn’t seem to appreciate is that with the “public option” – sooner or later, we’ll have a monopoly. While I agree that this can happen in the private sector, one enormous distinction exists.
The private sector hospital that screws up royally will go out of business ultimately. With only public option available (and if it exists, it will kill of private enterprise ’cause it can) – we will have no recourse for alternatives.
Of course, all this doesn’t even address if we’ll have hardly anyone left to deliver health care to us. See this from Shrinkwrapped.
http://shrinkwrapped.blogs.com/blog/2010/03/a-heealthcare-vignette.html
But – that is another discussion for another day ….
Krugman is a moron.
And private sector hospitals can also screw up royally, unseen and unaccountable, behind a nice, cozy firewall.
http://www.ctnewsjunkie.com/health_care/blumenthal_proposes_health_rep.php