My wife fell off a horse during a fox hunt, recalled the rich board chairman of a British appliance company, "and she went into Charing Cross for a tricky operation. They pinned her shoulder so it wouldn't go out." London's Charing Cross Hospital is one of the grimiest barracks of 3,119 hospitals run by Britain's National Health Service, and the fox-hunting wife went in as an NHS patient. Explained her husband, politically a Conservative: "In a private hospital, my wife's operation would have cost me $700, but we got it free. NHS takes a tremendous load off my mind."
Womb to Tomb....