Here are a couple of excerpts from the blog “blue crab boulevard” about the wonders of socialized medicine. As with most things in modern life, mindless bureaucracy is the problem. Some bureaucracy is necessary, of course, but it doesn’t have to be the mindless bureaucracy that so often characterizes government operations.

Continuing with all the "fabulous" news coming out about the British National Health Service, the Telegraph has a story detailing a crisis in a lack of hospital beds. Patients are being left in agony waiting to get treatment after sustaining serious injuries. How about waiting three weeks for badly broken bones to be repaired? Needless to say, the National Health Service is springing into action to address the problem: They want to censure the man who revealed the crisis.

A woman of 108 has been told by health chiefs that she must wait 18 months to get a new hearing aid.

Olive Beal, one of the oldest women in Britain, is confined to a wheelchair and losing her sight.

Being able to communicate and listen to music is her only contact with the outside world, says her family.

Mrs Beal, who has six grandchildren and 13 great-grandchildren, has used an old-fashioned analogue hearing aid for the last five years.

But she struggles to hear with it and needs a modern digital hearing aid which cuts out background noise.

After being told of the wait, Mrs Beal, who lives in a care home in Deal, Kent, said: "I could be dead by then."

Her granddaughter Maria Scott, 52, said: "I'd have thought they would take her age into account as she probably has not got 18 months to wait. Olive has worked hard from the age of 16 to her late 60s and paid taxes.