"In defence of the NHS: I'm glad I didn't break my leg in the US"

[Glenda]

My British friend sent me this:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2009/aug/19/nhs-healthcare-america?commentpage=2



Stephen Bates' intensive treatment after a serious fall has left him bewildered by attacks on the NHS in America

Of all the thoughts that flashed through my mind as I fell from 15ft up a ladder one morning last May, the potential financial cost of my unexpected descent was not one. I had been trying to paint the weatherboard above the bedroom windows of our house; a whim that had occurred to me in the middle of the night (as these things do) while working out chores for my week's holiday. Unfortunately, I reached just a little too far on a ladder just a little too short, and suddenly felt it slide from under me. Bouncing off the wall, knocking off the guttering and a carriage lamp in the process, I eventually collapsed in an inelegant heap on top of the ladder.

In the agonising hour that followed before our next-door neighbour arrived home and found me whimpering piteously for help, left leg utterly unresponsive, I had time to think of many things – including how stupid I'd been – but never the implications of my future treatment. This was Britain, after all. I would, without question, query or censure, be treated by the NHS at no cost to myself.

Not so, perhaps, had I bounced off the front of my parents-in-law's house in Houston, Texas. They are in their early 80s, expatriates from Britain for more than 50 years, and have followed my medical care with what I now realise is more than solicitous interest, thanks to the vitriolic US healthcare debate of recent weeks and the slagging-off that British medicine has received as a result (why do Americans always home in on the state of our teeth?).

(snip)
I can't tell what my treatment has cost the NHS, but I have some idea what it might have been in the US thanks to the in-laws' doctor, who gave an estimate based on prices in Houston. The figures are eye-watering. She reckons: $12,000 per operation; up to $3,500 for anaesthetics each time; hospital at $500 a day and ambulance $300 a trip. That's not counting the cost of medicine. It adds up to more than $76,000, or at least £47,000. We'd have had to sell the house I was so rashly attempting to paint.

(snip) ...

[CurtEastPoint]

1. Read the comments people made: I loved this one. He sums it up for us:

I've spent 30 years paying into "socialistic" health care systems (UK and Spain) which I rarely use, and have always been a net contributor to. Do I begrudge treatment to those who who benefit? Do I hell - some of them are friends and relatives of mine.

To the Americans defending the US system, I would say this..

You are being manipulated by vested interests - drug companies, insurance companies and right wing zealots. You pay twice as much per head for your health care, and what do you get for it? 15% of you have no cover, and probably another 30% either have inadaquate cover, or aren't covered for previously existing conditions. Your life expectancy and infant mortality rates are not only worse than European countries, they are also worse than countries like Cuba. Individual procedures are more expensive in the US (competition doesn't exist where cartels reign), and fear of illness is a constant concern.

I have no problem with a free-market approach to predictable or quantifiable costs - private insurance systems are fine for funerals - but one's health costs are impossible to even guess at. Individual health insurance systems can only operate if some people have no, or inadaquate cover - without the real possibility of not being treated, nobody would pay for cover.

There's a lot wrong with the NHS, and it may not be transferable to the US, but to hear people attacking it on the basis of cost in taxation is frankly ridiculous - if these people have adaquate cover in the US, they are probably paying 3 or 4 times as much, and if they are elderly, poor or already ill, it could be 10 times as much (more likely, they're not adaquately covered).

If you're relatively well off, healthy and young, then you may be better off under the US system - for the moment - but that may not survive a change of financial circumstances, the onset of illness, or the passage of time. If you think you're defending your freedom, right to choose, or the American way of life, you can keep deluding yourself - the vested interests that are pulling your strings know better: they're defending their right to profit from your fear.

[Glenda]

2. the comments are even more interesting than the article...

the commenters also seem more civil and thoughtful than what i see on US newspaper websites for viewer comments.

[HughMoran]

3. kick