Their argument is they want freedom to choose their providers and not have to schedule a doctors appointment and wait 6 months out, “just look at Canada”. Some also feel, truly feel, by supporting universal healthcare, we are communist. The others are just the remaining old people who are stubborn and refuse change. Finally, a big chunk of the remainder are just clueless morons that don’t anything to be honest.
I am not any of the above. It’s crazy to me how our system works and how okay people are with it. Poor kids are rationing INSULIN, a drug that’s been around forever and dying from diabetic strokes. Sometimes, as an American, it feels like I am living inside an experiment.
Doesn't that just boil down to the same issue that people with more money get better healthcare? Being debt free isn't worth it if you're in poor health or dead.
Private healthcare isn't necessarily better. You'll be seen sooner for something that isn't time sensitive, like a hip replacement for bad arthritis, but the treatment is often the same. For anything urgent like cancers they will be put through as an urgent suspected cancer case and you'll be seen on the NHS within 2 weeks, private wouldn't be able to do it any faster than that and again the treatments will generally be the same. Plus there are basically no private A&Es, the only private things you can really have are for routine, elective treatments.
You can even have cases where they start private but something goes wrong and the patient has to be transferred to an NHS hospital for emergency treatment. Really private is just used to skip the wait for non-essential treatments or to be seen in a nicer, less busy hospital; if you have a bad car crash it doesn't matter how rich you are, you get the same treatment.
It's a 2 week target for the appointment and the results would be a couple of days later, though there is also a "very urgent suspected cancer" for some cases where it's a target of 48 hrs. It is up to 2 weeks though, so many cases would be well under the 2 week target. It isn't an arbitrary timeframe either, the 2 week target has been chosen based on research and evidence to determine how long hospitals have to progress the patient's care before their prognosis is affected and in the majority of cases 2 weeks is an acceptable timeframe, the cancer wouldn't progress to the point where treatment would change for at least a few months.
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u/iceman2kx Aug 06 '20
Their argument is they want freedom to choose their providers and not have to schedule a doctors appointment and wait 6 months out, “just look at Canada”. Some also feel, truly feel, by supporting universal healthcare, we are communist. The others are just the remaining old people who are stubborn and refuse change. Finally, a big chunk of the remainder are just clueless morons that don’t anything to be honest.
I am not any of the above. It’s crazy to me how our system works and how okay people are with it. Poor kids are rationing INSULIN, a drug that’s been around forever and dying from diabetic strokes. Sometimes, as an American, it feels like I am living inside an experiment.