Government healthcare / what it's like living in a death-list state
My wife gave birth a couple of weeks ago, as I mentioned. In the subsequent fortnight, various things went horribly wrong. We're all getting better now, though, but that's not the point I'm driving at.
In the UK, we have a commie death-list style healthcare system, where some government-funded bureaucrat gets to say what care we receive before we get consigned to the skip in the back car park. To fund this travesty, we pay tax. Of course, it would be much better if I paid the costs directly, or via some kind of insurance policy (because insurance companies never cut you off if you claim too much, oh no).
Anyway, here's a summary of expensiveness between the five of us over two weeks:
Ambulance crew (4 hours) + entonox + new-baby kit
On-call midwife (6 hours) + various drugs, gloves, sutures, etc.
Duty midwife (1 hour)
GP home visit (1 hour)
Ambulance crew (1 hour)
Hospital emergency admission and 4-night stay, drugs, food, lung scan, etc.
Visit to GP, prescription, antibiotics
Visit to GP
Hospital emergency admission, medical team all day, more drugs, no overnight stay
Visit to GP, prescription, medicine
Five visits by duty midwife (1-2 hours each)
Visit by health visitor (1 hour)
Add to this the fact that my wife has been suffering terribly with asthma during the course of her pregnancy and has been sucking down inhaler after inhaler, and visiting an asthma specialist at the hospital every month, also add to this the fact that children and pregnant women pay exactly nothing for prescription medication (medication supplied by the hospital is free to everyone), and the result is that all of this care, which has been to a very fine standard, has cost me nothing at all beyond my normal tax bill.
It's worth bearing in mind that my wife's asthma is a chronic condition that no insurance company is going to go near (our employer-provided insurance scheme lists it as an explicit exclusion). It's the reason she needs a constant stream of prescription medication, and is the thing that is most likely to land her in hospital. There's no way we could cover the cost of this on our own.
It's also worth bearing in mind the fact that, while we were in hospital, the staff were keen to keep her in as long as it took to make her better, and nobody had to care about how much her stay was costing. In addition, when one of the children was faced with an overnight stay in hospital, the cost of this treatment was not a factor at all in the decision made to let him home instead.
And that is why I simply cannot understand the outrage in that young little country in the West, you know: the one under Canada, when their first mixed-race president suggests that poor people should have doctors too.
In the UK, we have a commie death-list style healthcare system, where some government-funded bureaucrat gets to say what care we receive before we get consigned to the skip in the back car park. To fund this travesty, we pay tax. Of course, it would be much better if I paid the costs directly, or via some kind of insurance policy (because insurance companies never cut you off if you claim too much, oh no).
Anyway, here's a summary of expensiveness between the five of us over two weeks:
Ambulance crew (4 hours) + entonox + new-baby kit
On-call midwife (6 hours) + various drugs, gloves, sutures, etc.
Duty midwife (1 hour)
GP home visit (1 hour)
Ambulance crew (1 hour)
Hospital emergency admission and 4-night stay, drugs, food, lung scan, etc.
Visit to GP, prescription, antibiotics
Visit to GP
Hospital emergency admission, medical team all day, more drugs, no overnight stay
Visit to GP, prescription, medicine
Five visits by duty midwife (1-2 hours each)
Visit by health visitor (1 hour)
Add to this the fact that my wife has been suffering terribly with asthma during the course of her pregnancy and has been sucking down inhaler after inhaler, and visiting an asthma specialist at the hospital every month, also add to this the fact that children and pregnant women pay exactly nothing for prescription medication (medication supplied by the hospital is free to everyone), and the result is that all of this care, which has been to a very fine standard, has cost me nothing at all beyond my normal tax bill.
It's worth bearing in mind that my wife's asthma is a chronic condition that no insurance company is going to go near (our employer-provided insurance scheme lists it as an explicit exclusion). It's the reason she needs a constant stream of prescription medication, and is the thing that is most likely to land her in hospital. There's no way we could cover the cost of this on our own.
It's also worth bearing in mind the fact that, while we were in hospital, the staff were keen to keep her in as long as it took to make her better, and nobody had to care about how much her stay was costing. In addition, when one of the children was faced with an overnight stay in hospital, the cost of this treatment was not a factor at all in the decision made to let him home instead.
And that is why I simply cannot understand the outrage in that young little country in the West, you know: the one under Canada, when their first mixed-race president suggests that poor people should have doctors too.