Basically Ipswich hopsital agreed with it’s Trust that patients should wait 4 months before being treated. However they had some spare capacity so some patients were treated before their 4 month wait was up. The hospital is now being penalized to the tune of £2.5 million pounds.
What. The. Fuck?
In a situation where we have waiting lists it is unconscionable that it should be deemed preferable to have highly paid medical staff sat on their asses ratherthan performing the duties they are trained for. This cannot be a good model to progress under.
My local hospital, too…bloody hell, as if anyone still needed evidence that the NHS is screwed up beyond belief with irrelevant targets & bureaucracy. (Spatial Rift 47 - the consultations will have only been for non-urgent cases.)
Yes, because this one incident in another nation is all the evidence that anyone could ever need to condemn the notion of universal health care in a completely different country. Tool.
Four months of wait… or never being seen at all because you aren’t quite poor enough to qualify for free services, but nowhere rich enough to afford insurance. Hmmm.
Honestly? I was very well treated by the Canadian UHC system. In fact, it’s probably the reason I’m alive today. Or, at least, not up to my eyeballs in medical bills from 8 years ago.
Are there problems with UHC? Yes. Is it a step up, socially, in the grand scheme of things? Fuck yeah.
Yes, because our version would be EXACTLY THE SAME as other versions.
Tool.
I’m looking forward to the day that health insurance providers are put out of business and health care decisions are turned back to medical professionals and not some idiotic actuary.
Yep, that’s what goes on every day here with our universal health care system.
Oh, wait, no it doesn’t. I go to doctors and hospitals here, both private and government-run, on a regular basis and nothing like this has ever happened.
Would you please stop perpetuating this bullshit? Hospitals cannot refuse urgent care based on ability to pay. You may have a collection agency call you 3 months later, but hospitals DO NOT turn away people in need of health care because they aren’t insured or have a gold card.
If you need to see a doctor in the US, you’re going to see one. If you have a problem with cost of the care, look to the hospital board of directors, the insurance companies, the lawyers endlessly suing, the malpractice insurance paid to protect against the lawyers, ad nauseum.
This fucking meme of Americans dying at the doors of hospitals because they aren’t rich is really getting to be too fucking old. You aren’t entitled to a kidney transplant and better hope to God you have good insurance if you need one, but if you need urgent care you’re not going to be left in the parking lot to flop around like a fish. You will be put on dialysis (sp?) in most cases. But that depends on the hospital you go to. Not every one is perfect, but if an asshole is running the joint, that isn’t indicative of the overall health industry.
At least this way you can choose which asshole you’ll frequent. Don’t like one hospital? Go to another. Does any American really want Congress to have final say? (That’s for the Americnas, not much to do with the Op. Sorry.)
But 4 months to see a doctor?!? I’ve heard of it for years and still can’t fathom it. Even in my days without insurance, I went at one point 3 years without ever paying a penny letting the bills pile up. (Yeah, I was part of the problem I guess.) Not once was I ever turned away for things as simple as physicals.
But I’m sure the US has the worst health care system known to man and we should change it.
Sure. My wife had to wait 6 weeks to have her gall bladder out when she lived in Alberta. Compare that with a client of mine who had his gall bladder out the day after he was told it needed to be removed.
Now, I’m not saying that UHC will mean that everyone has to wait for months all the time, but the number of those instances will skyrocket. It boggles my mind how the UHC supporters seem to think that implementing such a system will lead to greater efficiency and lower costs. There hasn’t been a government run program in the history of mankind that led to efficiency and savings. Expecting that UHC will be the first to achieve this strikes me as stupid and unrealistic.
Yes, because government run insurance will pay for anything we want, and won’t cost us a dime! The government will pay for it all, all the time! They’ll be shoveling money down the throats of doctors and nurses, and never require a single sheet of paperwork or even demand a diagnosis! Hell, we’ll have nuns getting abortions and children getting gastric bypass! Everyone will have a monthly face lift so we look forever young and we’ll all get our joints replaced yearly like the six million dollar man! It’ll be a paradise on earth I tell you! You want a bigger dick? A tighter vagina? A slimmer waist? A thicker head of hair? You got it! No questions asked! It’s all free, free, free, no questions asked! Tell me footlose, did your parents have any children who lived?
Except for the unemployment benefits paid to the legion of lawyers that would be out of work.
It’s funny how the people that bitch about Social Security, Medicaid, Medicare and just about anything else funded by D.C. for not running those programs responsibly are often the same people that want to entrust health care to those very people.
I don’t intend to do the “Rah-rah USA” thing here, but if the “health care crisis” were really true, why the hell aren’t we seeing an exodus of citizens and severe drop in immigration?
IMO, it goes back to the fact that Americans are so comfortable in life, that we can afford to say, “Well, I’m doing allright, but the guy down the street is having a struggle, so everything has to change!”
You are absolutely right. If someone is wheeled into the ER with a heart attack that person will be treated. In the ER and in the ICU with ER and ICU rates. That costs a fortune.
If that same person had regular medical care the regular checkups would have caught the warning signs and prescribed preventative care. But, hey, who cares what costs more - the patient ain’t gonna be turned away.
I’ve read too many stories and seen too many statistics about hospitals nearing bankruptcy because of the “ER as primary care” phenomenon to buy your line of bullshit anymore.
First: I disagreed with what I quoted but I realize that you agree that the US healthcare system isn’t right. I may have come across unduly harsh but I do stand with what I said.
Second:
Because it’s hard to legally emigrate, and because most people are more concerned with things like roofs and food than healthcare - until they actually need it, that is.
[QUOTE=Weirddave]
Sure. My wife had to wait 6 weeks to have her gall bladder out when she lived in Alberta. Compare that with a client of mine who had his gall bladder out the day after he was told it needed to be removed.
Now, I’m not saying that UHC will mean that everyone has to wait for months all the time, but the number of those instances will skyrocket. It boggles my mind how the UHC supporters seem to think that implementing such a system will lead to greater efficiency and lower costs. There hasn’t been a government run program in the history of mankind that led to efficiency and savings. Expecting that UHC will be the first to achieve this strikes me as stupid and unrealistic.
QUOTE]
Total aside. I went to my doc last week. He sent me to get an ultrasound. The ultrasound came back and I have Gall Stones. I went to see the surgeon on Monday. They are cutting me open to remove the little bastard tomorrow. Total wait time for surgery, three days. I actually kind of wanted more time. I was thinking it’d be a couple weeks. When the scheduling preson asked ‘How’s Thursday?’ my reaction was "You mean this Thurday? Really, this Thursday?’.
As far as the story goes, it has to be one of the dumbest fucking things I have ever heard. An agreement that ‘patients should wait at least four months for treatment.’. What the fuck is that?
It sounds like the point of the agreement would be that certain patients did not get hung out on the waiting time. It sounds like the idea of the agreement was ‘The average wait time for patients is four months (!?!?) to get treated so all patients should be treated within four months’ and some dumbass turned that into ‘If the average wait time is four months, then all patients need to wait four months because that is the average wait time.’
Which is just fucking silly. Why in the fuck would you put an agreement in place to INCREASE THE WAIT TIME for patients. Schedules rarely remain unchanged in the real world. If the schedule changes and an opening comes up the next patient in line should get the spot. If that person can’t take it, it should go to the patient after that.
This is why I think governments shouldn’t be in the business of health care. They end up with really wacked ass policies. This paricular policy punishes the patient by making them wait when there is no good reason and punishes the hospital for treating patients in a timely mannor.
