Healthcare state

Ah, let me add to the gaseous mass swirling the blogosphere regarding the UK as a model for healthcare. The BBC has skimmed some of the lib-con rhetoric & mounted an extremely understated defense of the Nation Health Service (NHS).

The cons are spitting foam, fulminating in overdrive that Obama’s proposed “public option” will be exactly like the NHS, & therefore we’re all doomed. Q.E.D.

What’s really interesting is their use of a “fact”—if Stephen Hawking lived in the UK, he’d long since be pushing up daffodils because the NHS wouldn’t have budged to keep even his brilliant ass alive—a fact, I point out, that is patently & easily proven completely false. Hawking is a British subject, lived all his life there, presumably with the help of the care provided by the NHS. Although of course, being an international celeb & having appeared on Star Trek: The Next Generation, he presumably is covered by private insurance, & thus able to tap into specialists without having to wait in the NHS queue.

(Now, the Beeb cites the Guardian & the Telegraph as quoting Hawking that he “wouldn’t be here if it were not for the NHS”. But that doesn’t mean the NHS has provided all Hawking’s care throughout his lifetime. & the quote doesn't mention the private option.)

The libs of course are having a field day shooting down the cons’ fallacious warheads, which, frankly, the cons are making really easy targets. Still even if the missiles aren’t armed that doesn't mean they don’t cause damage. The hordes of polyester-clad citizens storming Congressional healthcare town halls ranting about Obama’s death panels because they heard about them on Fox is proof that a rallying point doesn’t have to be true to be effective.

(Think back to Hitler’s “stab-in-the-back-by-the-November-criminals”. Whacking great porky pie, but irrefutably successful.)

So let me weigh in, since I happen to know something about the NHS. It was a revolutionary idea back in the 1940s: make healthcare available to the entire population on an equal basis, regardless of income or class. (Keep in mind that in both world wars Britain had a bit of a problem finding cannon fodder hale enough to schlep a Sten gun in rough terrain, so there was a geopolitical as well as social underpinning to the program.)

&, back in the 40s, it was probably state-of-the-art medical care.

But when I came upon it in the late 1990s it was pretty rickety. The coverage for various procedures varies by council area (what the Brits call “postal code healthcare”), so that if you live in one area you’re not covered for fertility treatments (or there’s a long queue waiting for treatments) but if you live in another you’re in like Flynn.

You’re assigned a doctor (a General Practitioner) according to the practitioner’s catchment area. & when you move, you’re expected to get treatment from the practice serving your new location. When I moved from Maidenhead to London, but Maidenhead was still more convenient because it was near my office, the entire system practically ground to a halt because I refused to have to break in a new GP.

If your GP orders routine blood work, you have to make an appointment for another visit—either in that same practice or in some other location because they’re not equipped for it. (When was the last time you visited your primary care doc & couldn’t get blood sucked out of you by one of the nurses or a lab tech?)

When I told my GP that it had been about a year since my last mammogram, so I wanted to schedule one, she looked quite puzzled. Why would I want that? Because it’s been a year since my last one. But here we do it once every three years for cost reasons; because (wait for it) only one in ten women is at risk.

Uh, that’s a double-digit percentage & there would be riots in the streets here if peri-menopausal women were told that their doctor thought it okay to spin the wheel with their chances of getting breast cancer.

I also recall news stories (in the broadsheets, not the tabloids) comparing the NHS unfavorably to healthcare in Europe. There was one example of two women, one in Britain & one in France, both with dodgy mammograms. The next day the Frenchwoman was in hospital getting a biopsy; the Brit waited a couple of months to see a specialist & some more time to get the biopsy.

There was another story that really imprinted on my mind: this one guy with heart trouble. He was on the NHS waiting list for some procedure (might have been bypass, or stent—at this distance I can’t recall), but died before his turn came. Here’s the kicker: his relatives intoned, “Well, he had the money to go private [get non-NHS care], but it was a matter of principle with him. He was entitled to NHS service so that's what he was going to get.”

I don’t have any answers to the broken system we have here—God knows I’ve rolled the dice going without insurance in the past, hoping I would just stay healthy; I know what a harrowing feeling that is, like continually walking a tightrope. & I’ve had “coverage” by Anthem, the worst insurance company you can pay premiums to.

But regardless of whether the NHS kept Stephen Hawking alive, I wouldn’t have the NHS on a platter. So it’s a good thing it is not what Obama is proposing.