Here’s an article you can use: Betrayed by the NHS: Doctor who gave her life to health service is refused vital cancer drugs that could save her | Daily Mail Online
I eagerly await the excuses and equivocations that are sure to follow.
You can’t blame an entire system on an administrative fuck up. It’s not like nobody is entitled to the treatment. This woman has just fell between the cracks of bureaucracy, but after giving her story to The Mail, she’ll probably get to jump the queue a bit now.
“She now faces the agonising decision of whether to cancel her wedding to her childhood sweetheart and allow her retired parents to remortgage their home to buy her the chance of extra years of life.”
Gee, what does that sound like?
Too bad she didn’t live in the US where she could have had a hospital refuse to perform the treatment. Or had her insurance company launch a fraud investigation because she developed breast cancer. Nothing like trying to fight cancer AND accusations of insurance fraud at the same time.
Makes you wonder why a beautiful, young, doctor wouldn’t just move to the US and get as far away from socialized medicine as she could. Odd that she choose to stay, and plans to continue working after treatment, considering it’s so horrible.
So in a couple weeks, when this gets resolved, are you planning to apologize? I’m pretty confident the government will make sure she gets that treatment.
Quite, it is rather telling that the lady concerned is not advocating for the aboltion of the NHS (although it is her employer… like a million others in this country).
But I figured SA wouldn’t read this story unless I brought it to his attention, and I’m certainly not going to pass it to him secretly.
How is it a National Health Service if some people can get the treatment from their “Trusts” and some can’t? It doesn’t sound very national to me. Maybe some UK doper can explain such a bizarre system.
It is basically what it sounds like.
The difference between trusts is nothing like the difference between constiuent countries though. Scottish health care is enormously better than England’s (and it has to be really, given Glasweigans’ determination to have the lowest life expectancy in Europe through entirely self inflicted lifestyle choices).
What excuses and equivocations? Someone on socialized heathcare was denied treatment that would probably save her life. This isn’t news but I can’t see how it can be excused or equivocated.
wrt Glasgow, for your amusement: BBC NEWS | Scotland | Glaswegians 'live shorter lives'
Don’t feel sorry for them, as I say it’s entirely their fault. Smoking, drinking, fried mars bars…
Na, he still hasn’t read it. You need to send it to Rush Limbaugh first. There are appropriate channels that must be followed. He passes it to Palin and Hannity. Then it get’s put on a bulletin board at Fox News. Beck will cry about it. Then a dozen or so blogs will simultaneously come up with a surprisingly consistent message. Finally Colbert will mock and ridicule the whole lot of them.
It’s stupid that people in certain parts of the UK can get this treatment, since it is approved by some of the local NHS trusts, but not for others.
I hope that this individual gets the treatment she needs, and I also hope that this general situation that allows people to fall between the cracks of treatment is remedied. It’s important to be critical of bad things that happen in UHC, so that improvements can be made.
Because healthcare is such a hot-button topic with politicians, I expect that improvements to the system will be put into place. It’s one of the great things about UHC: publicity for individual cases can lead to improvements in the system that benefit everyone.
Unlikely, it’s been this way for donkey’s
There is no such thing as a perfect healthcare system. There are countless horror stories from each side of the pond. This kind of thing shouldn’t be happening within the NHS, and it needs to be fixed.
But taking individual stories as typical is misleading. If I did that, I would think that loads of people in the USA go bankrupt trying to pay for treatment that you’d get for ‘free’ in the UK. And that a huge chunk of the nation doesn’t have health insurance anyway because of pre-existant conditions. Obviously that isn’t the case. It’s wrong to exaggerate.
It may be opinion, but even with it’s faults, the NHS does seem a little bit better than the US health care system.
One of the most ironic things is that the NHS was only founded due to said individual stories; 96% of the population could get free healthcare in the year before it was created…
Oh, I didn’t know that. Do you have a ‘cite’ or something so I can read into it further?
I’m positive that people who support UHC in the U.S. do not state that the reason they support it is that no person will fall through the cracks in the system.
I’m also pleased to note that Shadow Health Secretary Andew Lansdale, a member of the Shadow Cabinet of the CONSERVATIVE Party, has criticized the decision and I have no doubt that, should the Conservative Party win the upcoming election, that they will take immediate action to remediate loopholes such as this.
This is what I think has happened and will happen now. If we went looking, we could find any number of these stories from anywhere that has UHC. There was a story on our local news recently about a teenage boy who had some treatable condition (I think it was cysts in his brain) that were repeatedly missed here, but when his family went to the US to get treatment, he was instantly cured, and our Alberta healthcare wasn’t interested in re-imbursing the family for the tens of thousands of dollars it cost them. Last I heard, though, they actually were in negotiations with the Alberta government to be re-imbursed (probably due in part to the focus of news stories like the one in the OP).
There are also hundreds of thousands of stories like my husband’s; gall bladder had to come out, two weeks later it was out; total cost to us - zero dollars. Total calls from insurance companies and collection agencies - zero. Total hassle - zero.
(Of course healthcare was significantly cheaper back then)
(In fact that article doesn’t make it clear enough; the NHS was not even marketed at the time as “universal health care”. It was marketed as centralised control being more efficent. It seems astounding now, but that’s the truth.)
This will be interesting.
Right now we have a general election running, and one of the campaign posters of the challengers to the current administration states
‘We will end the postcode lottery on cancer drugs’
This poster is well within easy walking distance, and given that this particular newspaper is an avid supporter of the challengers, this story is not much surprise.
Each Local Health Authority has the freedom to decide which treatments are the priorities for their area, which makes some sense since populations have differant demographics - for example the South Coast and especially Eastbourne and Frinton are noted for having a higher proportion of elderly people.
Unfortunately, there is only money that can be spent once and the balance is how much to spend individually against the number of treatments you can make in all.
We in the UK are rated relatively low when it comes to cancers.
What this does, is show up one weakness in our NHS, and there are plenty more.
No system is perfect, but not even being able to obtain diagnosis until it is far too late is a fault of the US system, because of you don’t have the insurance then this condition would not be classed as an emergency.
You might even mention, that had she chosen, she could have opted for her own medical insurance in the same way as the US system works, but now that she has this condition it will obviously be impossble to obtain cover, and that is one of the serious flaws in the US system.
As a cost/benefit thing, it seems very poor judgment on the part of her particular employer, as she has cost a fortune to train, and the service she provides will not be available from her - in this view that cost of her treatment compared to her future benefit of work is quite small.