This is what the future has in store for America if we accept government-run health care. Guaranteed.

Liberals like to point to British health care as a model for reforming our system. But how will they react to news that doctors are being forced to prescribe water because elderly patients are dying of thirst in British hospitals? Something tells me they’ll make excuses or ignore the story entirely.

Doctors are prescribing drinking water for neglected elderly patients to stop them dying of thirst in hospital.

The measure – to remind nurses of the most basic necessity – is revealed in a damning report on pensioner care in NHS wards.

Some trusts are neglecting the elderly on such a fundamental level their wards could face closure orders.

The snapshot study, triggered by a Mail campaign, found staff routinely ignored patients’ calls for help and forgot to check that they had had enough to eat and drink.

Dehydration contributes to the death of more than 800 hospital patients every year.

Another 300 die malnourished. The latest report – by the Care Quality Commission – found patients frequently complained they were spoken to in a ‘condescending and dismissive’ manner.

The watchdog said three of 12 NHS trusts visited in the past three months were failing to meet the most basic standards required by law.

To review, 25% of British government health care trusts failed to meet even the most basic standards of human decency. And more than 1,100 British patients die annually of dehydration and malnutrition alone in these facilities.

Things have gotten bad enough that inspectors have been forced to make surprise visits to government hospitals just to ensure that elderly patients are being treated properly.

Inspectors also found routine examples of patients’ meals being dumped by their bed while they were asleep and then taken away again untouched.

Emergency call buttons are often left out of patients’ reach and they often have to press them seven times before a nurse responds. One elderly man was forced to attract attention by banging on his water jug or shouting.

Just lovely.

So the British have 25% of their hospitals surveyed failing the most basic legal standards of human dignity, as elderly patients are often neglected to the point of literally dying of thirst and starvation. What a great system! Let’s have that here.

Hey, maybe that’s the Democratic plan to get Medicare costs under control. Put the elderly in government-run systems and watch Medicare expenses drop as senior citizens, um, no longer require medical services.