Shattered Lives: 100 Victims of Government Health Care

There's no such thing as a free lunch, but the government keeps trying to sell us one anyway.

And so it is with government-run health care. Sold to the public in the guise of free, it is in fact more costly than any private alternative, for its price tag is more than financial. Those who chose to rely on government health care frequently pay not just in taxes, but in a more costly currency: pain, fear, suffering and death.

Shattered Lives contains 100 stories telling the tales of people who paid a costly price within their nation s government-run health care system. They come from all walks of life. Some are poor, some are working or middle class and some are at the highest echelons of their societies. One, at the time his story took place, was a prime minister.

In some of these tales, the difficulties encountered are relatively minor a person spending a few days without any food, for example. In others, the story ends in death.