You know that saying about “quality, not quantity?” Proponents of socialized medicine like Michael Moore and pretty much every single Democrat Presidential candidate could stand to take that one to heart, because while government-run health care may make medical care available to more it also dilutes the quality of that care.

Dilutes it to the point where people actually die.  Hundreds of thousands of people.

Poor NHS treatment has led to almost half a million Scots dying in the last 30 years, a new study has revealed.

Doctors at Glasgow University found that between 1974 and 2003, a total of 462,000 people died in Scotland as a result of health service failings.

It means Scotland has one of the highest avoidable death rates in western Europe.

The study examined the number of deaths caused by a lack of “timely and effective health care”.

One argument those of us opposed to government health care routinely make is that when the government controls health care there are shortages and delays in health care services due to inefficiency and over-demand.  So what is the cause of most of the avoidable deaths in Scotland?

Shortages and delays in medical care:

The vast majority of people - around 250,000 - who died due to inadequate or delayed treatment were heart or stroke patients.

Another 7300 had cancer and slightly more than 2000 were pneumonia patients.

One would think that this sort of tragic evidence about the abysmal failure nationalizing health care industries leads to would deter those in favor of it, but it probably won’t.  Because that’s what liberalism all about.  Dragging us all down to the lowest common denominator for the sake of “equality.” In this instance, dragging us all down to a lower quality of health care.