Socialized medicine sucks
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Leftists keep telling us how shitty the US system is while praising the world's NHS system, namely the UK's.
In England and Wales, they recently announced that they are to stop doing 17 quality of life surgeries, such as tonsil removal and carpal tunnel surgeries.
The NHS is loaded with politics and dirty dealings, such as falsely canceling someone's appointment and claiming it was the patient, as well as not allowing treatments due to cost while allowing other treatments that aren't beneficial because it's for the whamens as as a decade ago with the supposed miracle cure breast treatment that cost a fortune and did very little and only helped a certain type of breast cancer.
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Weight loss surgery is expensive upfront compared to T2 Diabetes treatments, but in the long run, it's a cost benefit.
Politicians don't want to have their name associated with the temporary increased spending when they run for re-election.
Leftists scream that insurance companies have "death panels", but refuse to admit that people die under socialized medicine due to politics.
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Just to clarify, do you have first hand experience of the NHS or is this just based on something you read?
Granted, the NHS in the UK is far from perfect but my experience of it over the past 40 years or so has always been positive.
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I live in the UK.
I was almost killed by the NHS about a decade ago and left with permanent nerve damage in both hands about 15 years ago. I've discussed these things here before. I've also discussed my experience with my sciatica and how crap the NHS is at treating it or not.
I'm not sure why you asked if I experienced the NHS or just read about it somewhere. There are plenty of articles about how badly the NHS is failing.
I don't have personal experience with breast cancer, but the scandal of them allowing that extremely overpriced breast cancer drug to be used by women with forms of breast cancer that it wasn't effective for was plastered all over the media back when Blair was PM.
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What makes you think we don't have the same problems in the US? At least in the UK you can get an appointment to be accidentally cancelled. Many people in the US can't get the appointment at all because they don't have insurance. Unfortunately we elected a President who lied about giving people healthcare.
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Liars are those who promise to give you free stuff.
I believe he didn't promise this.
High prices are not solved by making things "free". -
What makes you think we don't have the same problems in the US? At least in the UK you can get an appointment to be accidentally cancelled. Many people in the US can't get the appointment at all because they don't have insurance. Unfortunately we elected a President who lied about giving people healthcare.
I'm a dual national (US/UK).
I never had a problem getting an appointment in the US, with or without insurance. Also, why don't you have insurance in this day and age?!
Under Obama-care, everyone in my family that already had insurance saw their premiums skyrocket.
And NO, the UK appointments that get canceled are not done accidentally. It's done on purpose to meet government targets.
They built a new state of the art hospital in Glasgow. It was severely undersized to and unable to meet the needs of the area.
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Liars are those who promise to give you free stuff.
I believe he didn't promise this.
High prices are not solved by making things "free"You are 100% wrong. He did promise that the government would pay for it. He was very clear on that.
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Because he is more populist so he would sign congress bill on that.
And I think Paul Ryan almost gave you some form of ocare2.0 with insurance companies bailouts (but was not able to).More conservative way is deregulation and jobs and it looks like they are successful at it.
So more people can afford services. -
If you want decent medical care in the UK, you need to have insurance. How is that better than in the US?!
Beauracrats decide what treatments you can have (or not) and most of the time it's politically motivated, like the breast cancer treatment I mentioned above. The criteria for treatments are ever changing and you are always chasing that elusive "criteria met" letter saying you can now get the treatment you need.
As I have pointed out several times before, the NHS is quite sexist in how they dole out treatments, or not.
There is also a massive problem with "postcode lottery" in the NHS. If you live in one postcode you may get a treatment, but if you live across the street in a different postcode you may be denied the treatment.
You are at the mercy of politicians as to what medical services you can get. Mental health, dermatology, and many other specialties are extremely difficult to get through the NHS. Where I live, unless you are committed to the state loony bin (which is over full), you have to go through a charity or a private clinic to get mental health help.
I know my pathetic stalker won't have the balls or mental ability to discuss this.
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If you want decent medical care in the UK, you need to have insurance. How is that better than in the US?!
Beauracrats decide what treatments you can have (or not) and most of the time it's politically motivated, like the breast cancer treatment I mentioned above. The criteria for treatments are ever changing and you are always chasing that elusive "criteria met" letter saying you can now get the treatment you need.
As I have pointed out several times before, the NHS is quite sexist in how they dole out treatments, or not.
There is also a massive problem with "postcode lottery" in the NHS. If you live in one postcode you may get a treatment, but if you live across the street in a different postcode you may be denied the treatment.
You are at the mercy of politicians as to what medical services you can get. Mental health, dermatology, and many other specialties are extremely difficult to get through the NHS. Where I live, unless you are committed to the state loony bin (which is over full), you have to go through a charity or a private clinic to get mental health help.
I know my pathetic stalker won't have the balls or mental ability to discuss this.
Once again you are describing we have the in the US today. CEO's and employers decide which care I can get. Unless I am in a Union, I don't have any say in it at all. I'm at the mercy of what my employer and the insurance company CEO decide.
You should be thankful that you have state loony bins. Most Republican Governors closed them all in the 90's. This has contributed to the rise in mental health issues like drug addiction.
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I have to pay twice if I want adequate health care; high taxes and insurance. Your narrative is ruined by that.
There are lots of drugs and treatments that you can't get on the NHS but can get privately (insurance and/or self-pay). This means the government agrees they are safe and effective, but they don't want to pay for it. This list grows bigger all the time. I gave some examples earlier, but my sciatica won't be treated properly because the surgery is no longer allowed on the NHS. Nope, I have to do injections 4 - 6 times a day to deaden the nerve. Quality of life doesn't mean shit to the NHS/government and that's why they keep adding those things to the list they don't cover.
The UK state loony bins are part of the prison system or they are private. The guy who killed MP Jo Cox should have been in a loony bin, but he and his family couldn't afford it and he wasn't sent to one in a criminal court. Well, now he's in one for murdering an MP. Many times, people sent to prison loony bins are let go due to overcrowding and are walking free within a couple of days.
"Care in the community" is the current fad in the NHS. Rather than keeping people in hospitals, loony bins, etc, etc they put them back in the community and hope some charity or local council will deal with them. This is costing the local councils a fortune and so council taxes have to go up to match the costs or we lose services.
As the NHS is part of the government, they rubber stamp things that most medical groups would reject outright. We see this with trash incinerators. The NHS rubber-stamped an incinerator in my area that will be put right next to an elementary school and the plum plotter shows the smoke will blow into the neighborhood.
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I have to pay twice if I want adequate health care; high taxes and insurance. Your narrative is ruined by that.
There are lots of drugs and treatments that you can't get on the NHS but can get privately (insurance and/or self-pay). This means the government agrees they are safe and effective, but they don't want to pay for it. This list grows bigger all the time. I gave some examples earlier, but my sciatica won't be treated properly because the surgery is no longer allowed on the NHS. Nope, I have to do injections 4 - 6 times a day to deaden the nerve. Quality of life doesn't mean shit to the NHS/government and that's why they keep adding those things to the list they don't cover.
The UK state loony bins are part of the prison system or they are private. The guy who killed MP Jo Cox should have been in a loony bin, but he and his family couldn't afford it and he wasn't sent to one in a criminal court. Well, now he's in one for murdering an MP. Many times, people sent to prison loony bins are let go due to overcrowding and are walking free within a couple of days.
"Care in the community" is the current fad in the NHS. Rather than keeping people in hospitals, loony bins, etc, etc they put them back in the community and hope some charity or local council will deal with them. This is costing the local councils a fortune and so council taxes have to go up to match the costs or we lose services.
As the NHS is part of the government, they rubber stamp things that most medical groups would reject outright. We see this with trash incinerators. The NHS rubber-stamped an incinerator in my area that will be put right next to an elementary school and the plum plotter shows the smoke will blow into the neighborhood.
Everything you are describing is the same system we have in the US. The only difference is that CEO's are making billions.
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It's not the same.
Paying sky-high taxes and having to pay insurance to get adequate medical care isn't the same as only having to pay for insurance.
Also, the NHS pays top-level managers for higher salaries than private UK medical hospitals/clinics.
If the UK and US are the same in the health care systems, then why does the left always tell us we need a UK style NHS?! The answer is simple, you guys look at the utopian idea and ignore the reality of the situation.
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I'm not saying they are the same. I'm only saying that the problems you are describing are the same. The biggest difference are the middle man insurance company CEO's who provide little value but suck up a ton of money from the system that could be better spent on care.
There are lots of drugs and treatments that you can't get on the NHS but can get privately (insurance and/or self-pay). This means the government agrees they are safe and effective, but they don't want to pay for it.
We have the exact same issue in the US. A CEO or an employer decides they don't want to pay and the person has to pay privately.
The UK state loony bins are part of the prison system or they are private. The guy who killed MP Jo Cox should have been in a loony bin, but he and his family couldn't afford it and he wasn't sent to one in a criminal court. Well, now he's in one for murdering an MP. Many times, people sent to prison loony bins are let go due to overcrowding and are walking free within a couple of days.
As I said, be thankful you have state loony bins at all. Most of ours were shut down by Republicans 25 years ago. Now we have a serious mental health issue in this country. We have a huge number of drug overdoses and we are the only country who has regular mass shootings.
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My point remains the same. The NHS is shit and leftists keep demanding the US go to that, rather than it's current system.
In the UK, you are forced to pay sky-high taxes for very basic medical care and if you want decent medical care after that, then you need to have insurance which isn't cheap.
It's nearly impossible to get a GP appointment in the NHS due to the fact that they are free and everyone running to them for even the most basic things like the sniffles.
In Scotland, prescriptions are free so people run to their GPs for everything, including aspirin which is extremely cheap over the counter. HOWEVER, it costs nearly £8 to process (write and fill, not counting GP appointment) a prescription making that £1 pack of aspirin cost the NHS nearly £9.
You'd expect business CEOs and employees to make decent money, but that's now the UK works. Senior management and above make tons of cash in government jobs. Thanks to Tony Blair, each hospital boss makes at least £4 million. Who knows what they are making now, a decade later. The guy that took over my old local hospital was making £150 for managing 10 BUPA hospitals but quit to become the boss of my local hospital and made £4.75 million under the NHS.
Remember one thing. The government doesn't care about you and your ability to pay, they will always get their money from you. If you can't afford your insurance you cancel it. You don't have that option for NHS payments.
Life expectancy in the UK is 1.9 years longer than the US. Remove obesity and the UK has a 6 year lower life expectancy. UK obesity rates are fast catching the US, so in a decade or so, even including that, life expectancy in the UK will be lower.
When you look at mortality rates, especially western ones, you will notice that the US is right in the mix with the countries with an NHS. Except for "external causes" (accidents, suicides, etc), the US wasn't the country with the highest death rate. As an example, death to circulatory system diseases, the US came in 4th after Austria, Germany, and Sweden.
The US has the 4th highest cancer survival rate, after Switzerland, Japan, and Sweden (respectively).
The UK has the highest death rate for respiratory diseases.
The US has the highest rate of death due to nervous system disease. This is mostly due to diabetes related nerve death. As I said before, if we exclude obesity, then the US does pretty well in this category.
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There was a hammer attack, which nearly killed 2 women (won't somebody think about the wahmens?!), near London recently.
It was committed by a nutter who, in 2010, was "sectioned" (UK term for being committed by a court) to the loony bin. Instead of taking proper care of the then "kid", they gave him some pills and sent him on his way for "care in the community".
"Care in the community" is the NHS's way to save tons of cash by ignoring their responsibility to take care of people and leaving them to sort themselves out and/or hope there's a charity to help them. Oddly, with this cash savings and added burden on communities, our taxes keep going up to fund the NHS. Local councils have to spend their money to take up a lot of the slack caused by this mess. Our taxes, of every sort and new ones always being created, keep going up while services keep getting cut.
This is part of the utopian healthcare system leftists are demanding the US go to.
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As noted several times before, I'm the chairman of my local council and I see first hand the shite created by the NHS failing to do it's duty of caring for people properly.
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Remember one thing. The government doesn't care about you and your ability to pay, they will always get their money from you. If you can't afford your insurance you cancel it. You don't have that option for NHS payments.
Wrong. You don't just cancel insurance in the US. Very few people have that option. For most people, you have the insurance that your employer provides. Period. You don't have a choice.
What CEO cares about you? The governments job is to serve the people. A CEO's job is to increase value for shareholders. It's much easier to vote out a politician than it is to get rid of a CEO.
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Wrong.
Government establishes bureaucracy and its job is to serve their own rules. And you have no control over it.
While private business has to compete for customers. -
I currently live in a contry with public healthcare (Brazil), and while it's not perfect, there are several things that surprised me about this system that I think many people in the U.S. don't realize:
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Public health systems are basically not for profit. All money that comes into the system returns in some form, with no owners or shareholders taking a cut;
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Since the govenment pays for the patients medicine, it's in its best interest to lower the medicines price. That means generic drugs are prescribed whenever possible. While generic drugs are available in the U.S., they are not ofently prescribed since the system runs for profit and brand-name drugs are far more profitable;
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Public healthcare do not completly replace private healthcare, if nothing else it makes it more competitive. By providing a base level health standard, the system pushes the private sector out of the emergencies / basic healthcare and into state of the art treatments. And because there is always a fallback option in the public healthcare, the private options need to be resonably priced to convince people that it's even worth considering.
Needless to say, those points are all incredbly threatening to the owners and shareholders of the companies running healthcare in the U.S. Running a good public healthcare system requires killing profits for some very influential people. That is always a very difficult thing to do.
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