The British know that their healthcare system is riddled with problems. However, no one, not even the self-styled conservatives, think that the system itself is FUBAR. Politicans routinely make promises to improve service and availablity but nothing happens. I guess the British public can sleep well at night, knowing that people get "free" healthcare. It really doesn't matter that the people actually CAN get the actual care, but the fact that its free makes the British get all warm and fuzzy.
The crux of the difference in liberal/conservative attitude is that liberals focus on intent, while conservatives focus on results. To liberals, it doesn't matter that people can't really get good free healthcare in reality, but that they intended to do make it so. Yes, in America you might have to figure out how you are going to get health insurance instead of defaulting the responsiblity to the government. However, if I had a horrible toothache, I could schedule an emergency appointment with my dentist for today. Like all things in life, you get what you pay for...
A woman told today how she got a friend to pull out one of her teeth with a pair of pliers and filmed the gruesome process on a mobile phone after failing to find an NHS dentist. Diane Hunter, 45, described how she became so exasperated after two years of toothache she opted for a DIY option. "In the end I just got really drunk and got a friend to pull it out with a pair of big pliers," she told the Bradford Telegraph and Argus.
"There was a lots of blood but I just needed the tooth out - it was causing me great pain and it still is." Failed search for NHS care Miss Hunter, who lives in the Listerhills area of Bradford, said she has not seen a dentist for more than 20 years and failed in her search for any offering NHS care.
She said she first tried the old schoolboy trick of tying one end of a piece of string around her tooth and the other around a door handle before slamming the door but it did not work. Miss Hunter told the paper she would never pull her own teeth out again.
"I was going to do it again but I showed a nurse at the doctor's surgery what I had done and she said it could cause a heart attack," she said.
She even went to hospital for help at one point but was never given anything more than paracetamol. Her friend performed the DIY dentistry about six months ago. Daily Mail
11 comments:
Do you really think that there aren't far more similar stories in the US, where millions go without health insurance?
The US healthcare system is pretty much universally acknowledged as the most inefficient in the world. For all the bleating about the inefficiencies of a state system, the average spend per person is lower in 'socialised' systems while all the indicators of health are the same or higher.
More, if Miss Hunter lived in the states she WOULD have been pulling her teeth out with pliers.
The problem with NHS dentistry in the UK is that most of the clinics are private. If Miss Hunter could afford it, she could have seen a dentist, just like in the states.
The NHS is there to provide health cover for all. It fails in dentistry because of the large proportion of private practices. But it is beyond dumb to suggest that Miss Hunter's situation would have been better in the wholly private situation of the US; the point of the story is that there are too few NHS (i.e. public) dentists to provide cover for all the people unable to afford private health care.
The biggest problem with 'free' or socialized healthcare is that the government cannot give $1 to anyone in services w/out taking $2 from Joe Taxpayer. Additionally, government cannot do, and has no incentive whatsoever to do anything efficiently.
It's not free and it never was.
"The NHS is there to provide health cover for all."
But what's the point of the NHS then if people cannot get to see a dentist? The British are then left with wasted taxpayer dollars on the NHS and people who in reality do not have any coverage at all (because people are pulling their own teeth out with pliers.)
Miss Hunter and every other Britian are being screwed twice, first they has to pay for NHS health insurance via taxes for which they receives no practical coverage and then they must go out and pay for it anyway.
As for your statements on the efficiencies of the US system/ socialist systems, where are you getting your "information" for that?
You could try, for starters, The New England Journal of Medicine, 340(1), 7 January 1999, p 48.
I'll e-mail you the .pdf if you can't open it yourself.
You haven't addressed my point - that under the US system Miss Hunter would almost certainly have been pulling out her own teeth, and that many MORE people are left without health cover than in the UK.
It's already established fact in Britian that the US healthcare system is mean. (In fact, since the sixties in the US, there is Medicaid for the people who can't afford health insurance, something most Brits do not know.)
However, you haven't addressed my point that Miss Hunter pays for a system that she doesn't not have practical access to. How much do you pay for NHS? If she makes 12000 quid a year, if she kept 5% from NHS, I recon that she could easily pay for a tooth pull with 600 quid. However, she must pay the 600 quid to the government but still must pull her own tooth.
For that putative £600 she gets cover for whatever long-term problem she is struck by, something that you do not get in the states. £600 is not going to get you much cancer care. But the NHS will do better, for the whole population, than the US. It does better in practice, and in principle it is unassailable.
More, she would pay in the states, as the most expensive and inefficient health care service in the world needs to be paid somehow. She pays everytime she buys an item, paying for the healthcare of others, and everytime she receives her pay cheque, paying for the health care of those richer with lower wages.
Like you said, everything needs to be paid for.
Obviously no one can get cancer care for £600. Many US companies subsidize health insurance. Otherwise here, everyone pays 1.5% of income for medicaid & medicare here in US. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medicaid)
However, the nationwide health insurance still creates the haves and have nots. People who have money pay for private care, while those without money are promised a system to which they don't have practical access. The problem lies in the fact that it is government run. The larger the program is, the worse it gets.
I take it, then, that you are ideologically for the break up of large corporations, which necessarily involve a level of planning inimicable to a belief in the achievement of a good society by means of the 'hidden hand'.
That ought to have ended with '?'
You can't use the "Chewbacca Defense". I have no idea what you just asked.
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