Healthcare: Facts & Fiction
Yahoo! Everyone is getting free medical treatment under the new government healthcare plan! Anytime I need to see a doctor my medical expenses are no more! Right?
Not so fast–more research should occur before we start singing songs of joy. The new American healthcare system is supposedly based on Great Britain’s National Health Service (NHS), and as an expatriate, I can definitely offer an insight, or two, on the two nationalized healthcare systems – Great Britain (GB) and the United States of America USA).
Yes, there are lines of people waiting to see the doctor, as there are here. However, in GB a person is assigned a doctor close in proximity to where they live. In the U.S. people can see a doctor anywhere. True, the doctor does have to be in the network assigned to the insurance, and people on Medicaid have to see doctors who take Medicaid.
Allow me to offer a brief history on the emergence of NHS in GB.
Prior to 1948, the healthcare system allowed for employees and employers to each pay a flat rate for healthcare/insurance, yet this only enabled the employee access to very limited healthcare. Hospital stays were limited to individuals “suffering from tuberculosis”.
The fee for the doctor was a universal rate, regardless of how many patients the doctor saw, a ‘capitation fee’.
People who worked in workhouses and children in school did receive limited treatment. Contributions were given to voluntary hospitals as a sponsorship for people who needed health treatment. We all know what happened in the financial crash in the 1930’s.
1948 ushered in the NHS that was paid by taxes (sound familiar?), and until 1951 everything was free. After 1951, people paid for eyeglasses, dental treatment, and prescriptions – not so free now…
By 1960, hospitals were so overcrowded that the elderly and chronically sick were denied treatment! Many doctors in the larger cities could have approximately 40,000 registered patients, with an average of three minutes visiting the doctor.
In the U.S, there is already a shortage of doctors and this “free” healthcare is not going to help the situation.
As a child visiting the doctor, I recall many hours just waiting to be seen by the doctor and the visit was very brief. When I needed surgery for a lazy eye I had to wait approximately 18 months for the surgery. People were on waiting lists for every conceivable procedure. Perhaps this is why my parents self-medicated with herbs and vitamins.
It gets even better, a high-ranking professor, Patrick Pullicino (Professor Pullicino is a consultant neurologist for East Kent Hospitals and Professor of Clinical Neurosciences at the University of Kent), discusses the new Liverpool Care Pathway (LCP) as nothing short of euthanasia, especially for the terminally ill and elderly. Pullicino boldly states that the NHS is killing 130, 000 people yearly – that is one hundred and thirty thousand people just killed because they are too old, or too ill, or too whatever…
The Liverpool Care Pathway came about and “is designed to come into force when doctors believe it is impossible for a patient to recover and death is imminent”.
Who makes the decision when it is impossible for a person to recover and death is imminent? If that does not scare and wake Americans up, then what will?
In the article, Pullicino also provides examples of elderly patients who were placed on the LCP, and either through his instructions, or the request of the family, and they recovered! It is a very informative article to read, and the comments from ordinary citizens are also quite enlightening.
One more brief note on the LCP, 85-year-old Olive Groom died alone and against her wishes. Her family did not know and the staff lied to them about what was taking place to Ms. Groom. The “hospital” had already pulled the feeding tubes whilst on the telephone informing the family that it was not important for them to visit right now. Scary article but a must read.
Cancer patients don’t stand much of a chance if the NHS is anything to use as a standard. American men with prostate cancer have an 80% chance of survival compared to English men and the survival rate for women with breast cancer is dismal with a mortality rate of 88% higher than in the U.S.
Nothing is free, and this is just the tip of the iceberg as to what disasters lay in wait for Americans as they “embrace” Obamacare. If it’s such a great healthcare system, why don’t our government members have to participate in it? We have got to become informed and let our voices be heard as to how We The People feel about the unlawfulness of this dictatorship and the decisions that are being made against our will!
