(Story at Daily Mail) If you’re going to have an asthma attack, be sure not to do it in front of a hospital — at least not in a country with socialized medicine. Once again Britain lights to the way into our bleak collectivist future: A student lay dying from an asthma attack outside a hospital after A&E [accident & emergency] staff refused to summon help, telling her friend to ring for an ambulance instead. 

• Melody Davis, 20, had been driven to casualty (hospital) but her friends got stuck behind a barrier to a staff car park.
• One of Miss Davis’s friends ran 150 yards into the A&E (Emergency) department and asked a receptionist to summon help.
• She was told she would have to dial 999 (British equivelent of 911) for an ambulance if she wanted emergency treatment.
• The staff member refused to place the call and told the friend to use a phone in the reception area.

*Rules are rules. The all-pervasive bureaucracy implicit in socialism reduces people to automatons who exist to obey them, oblivious to common sense.  (*You know the drill, take a number, go to window #2, follow the blue line, fill out the forms, take them to window #5 etc.. etc….)

• By the time she returned to the car several minutes later, the Liverpool University student had collapsed and another friend was trying to resuscitate her.

Eventually the proper forms must have been filled out and the mandatory protocol complied with, because Miss Davis was finally taken into the hospital, where she died free of charge, compliments of socialized medicine.