For those of you who think having nationalized socialized health care in this country would be wonderful, just take a read at this Daily Mail column from the UK.

On the last morning of his life, Ian Luck phoned his wife from the hospital bed where, ten days earlier, he had been admitted for a gastric disorder.

“He was crying so much I could hardly understand him,” says Debra, his widow and mother of his son Ben, now nine.

“Ian said he had spent most of the night in agony - the nurses had forgotten his pain-killing injections.

“He was covered in his own vomit, he’d been sick on the floor, and when a nurse finally came, she told him he was ‘disgusting’.”

A post-mortem showed that he had a ruptured oesophagus caused by continual vomiting….

…This rare condition causes massive shock and infection, which would have put fatal strain on the heart.

According to medical experts, the most likely cause of Ian’s excessive vomiting was a bleeding stomach ulcer, a condition that doctors initially picked up and treated.

But when Ian’s symptoms returned, they failed to carry out a simple exploratory process to diagnose further bleeding, which could have been treated with drugs or surgery.

As if his death wasn’t tragedy enough, Debra is haunted by the misery, pain and squalor he endured at the Princess Alexandra Hospital in Harlow, Essex, during the ten days before he died.

“An animal would have been treated with more compassion,” says Debra.

“No one wanted to help us. Every time we asked for pain relief, or to see a doctor, we were told to wait, or that we didn’t know what we were talking about.”

The final day of Ian’s life was spent in misery and humiliation on a geriatric ward, with uncaring nurses and doctors who failed to recognise that he was dying.

He had been shunted there from his surgical ward, having been told his bed was needed for a more urgent surgical patient.

“That day was a nightmare,” says Debra, now 43.

“I knew he was dying, his usual happy character had vanished, he was frightened and very low. He looked grey and clammy, his stomach was swollen, he was hallucinating and there was vomit all over his T-shirt.

“As fast as I changed him he was sick again. The nurses were not interested in helping me.

“At one point, an old man fell out of the bed next to us and lay there, crying for help. When I ran up to the nurses’ station to tell them, they said: ‘Just leave him.’

Read the rest, and if you still think socialized medicine is such a great idea vote for any one of the Democratic candidates for president and you, too, may have the pleasure of dying from something controllable and in your own vomit.