In the 2003 film The Barbarian Invasions, a patient’s wealthy son offers a handsome bribe to the administrator of a decrepit, chaotic, state-run hospital in Montreal that is (mis)treating his dying father. “This is silly,” the startled administrator exclaims. “We’re not in the Third World.”

Britain’s health-care system is perhaps slightly less state-dominated than Canada’s. Yet today comes the following report:

The British government apologised Wednesday after a damning official report into a hospital likened by one patient’s relative to “a Third World” health centre…

Between 400 and 1,200 more people died than would have been expected in a three-year period at the National Health Service (NHS) hospital, according to an investigation by the Healthcare Commission watchdog.

Receptionists with no medical training were left to to assess patients arriving at the hospital’s accident and emergency department, the report found.

Julie Bailey, whose 86-year-old mother Bella died in the hospital in November 2007, said she and other family members slept in a chair at her bedside for eight weeks because they were so concerned about poor care.

“What we saw in those eight weeks will haunt us for the rest of our lives,” said the 47-year-old. “We saw patients drinking out of flower vases they were so thirsty.

“There were patients wandering around the hospital and patients fighting. It was continuous through the night. Patients were screaming out in pain because you just could not get pain relief.

“It was like a Third World country hospital. It was an absolute disgrace.”

The politicians quoted in the story promised, again, that, you know, they would improve things.