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

[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.