Socialized Medicine: The British View

[poliphilo]

We Brits love our NHS.

Many of us (including Professor Stephen Hawking) think we owe our lives to it.

Universal healthcare, free at the point of delivery- brilliant, eh?  No worries about keeping up with the payments, no women in labour being turned away from hospitals because they don't have the insurance, no-one suffering or dying because they can't afford the drugs.

Sure we have our complaints:  the NHS has been mismanaged, over-managed, underfunded- there are constant scandals and controversies- but no politician would dare suggest dismantling it- not even those on the far, far right.  The battle for socialized medicine was won in the 1940s- and now there's no British institution- not the monarchy, not the BBC, not the "mother of  parliaments"- that's more highly regarded or more firmly bedded in.

We understand you Americans are being offered a system of socialized medicine similar to ours and that some of you, instead of dancing around in your pyjamas and firing off skyrockets, are actually campaigning noisily against it. This surprises us. It fact it bewilders us.  If we didn't regard you Americans as cousins we'd be going "Foreigners, eh?" and doing that thing where you hold your forefinger level with your temple and twirl it round and round.

Comments

[dadi.livejournal.com]

I think it is also a question how this national health service is managed.. in the UK it DOES work, but in Italy for example, it is a major, total desaster.. though "officially" you do have health service guaranteed, no matter if you are a homeless 90 year old or a rich banker, de facto if you don't have the money to either afford private insurance or pay for extra services, you often can as well up and die if you need anything out of the basic "survival" stuff. I have several female friends who, when pregnant, went to their doctor for the "usual" pregnancy examinations and were told that the waiting list for free ultrasounds and other necessary things were, like, 9 months into the future, so yeah, if you are 3 months pregnant, what do you do? yep, pay through your nose for your ultrasound, done by the same bloody structure who does the national health service, paid by national health money, but done out of national health service time (usually 4 hours a day) by the same doctors, privately. And a lot of Southern and Eastern European countries with nationalized health systems are exactly the same. Poor people continue to die in the ER waiting rooms, run around without teeth and live their old age blind and deaf, while the tax paying population pays absolutely absurd amounts of money into this bloodsucking system. I have no idea if that would be the case in the US, but I have seen too many of these systems FAIL to not be doubtful about them.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Oddly enough, the US opponents of the scheme are holding up the British system, not the Italian system, as an example of how things can go wrong.

A reasonably well-run country ought to be able to run a National Health Service reasonably well. Knowing what I know of Italian politics- not much, but all of it lurid- I'm not entirely surprised the health service is chaotic.

Our system does makes mistakes. It has pockets of excellence and pockets of fail. Fortunately I seem to live in one of the former.

[daisytells.livejournal.com]

I never could understand why ultrasounds have become routine for pregnancy. If an ultrasound detects an abnormality in the fetus, then the parents to be have to decide whether to abort and try again. If an ultrasound detects twins, so what? Later in the pregnancy there would be evidence of two heartbeats -- same result. What about learning the sex of the unborn? It never seemed to be terribly important until the invention of this expensive procedure. This does not seem to be an important enough consideration to warrant a very expensive and possibly risky-to-the-fetus procedure.
As for the ER problem: Recently one of our elderly gentlemen in my building who is quite well off and has private insurance waited 14 hours to be seen in the ER at one of Boston's finest hospitals. He was suffering from penumonia, and at his age there was a very real danger of death. When he was finally admitted to a bed "upstairs" - more than 24 hours later, he had to spend over four weeks in the hospital.