This is what far right Rethugs & PUMA Nutters are saying about the NHS

[TheBigotBasher]

Include me out as an expert on either health care or health insurance, which can, in practice, be two very different things.
They are, though, bedfellows (some might say badfellows) in legislation currently being concocted by our reprehensibles in the District of Conundrum – few of whom, I hazard an educated guess, are much better qualified than am I.
Despite that shortcoming, they were recently poised to stampede their proposal through our House of ill repute in time for a summer vacation to which they were about as entitled as is O. J. Simpson to a full pardon.
This was in blithe non-recognition of the fact that the bill involved gazillions of dollars in IOU’s bequeathed to future generations, a plentitude of pork and pipe dreams and the creation of a revolutionary new Hypocritical Oath.
Mind you, now, I am the grateful beneficiary of both Medicare and a secondary insurance provider, which sugar-coat, and often sugar-daddy, the cost of the physical deterioration, deferred maintenance and functional obsolescence which are nearabout pandemic among my fellow octogenarians.
Furthermore, I believe that adequate health care should be available to every American able to pay for it and subsidized for those who are not.
However, I hold firmly that the design and implementation of such a system should not be left in the hands (make that the jaws) of the piranhas who swim in the mainstream and tributaries of government.
Whenever that system has been tried, and wherever it now prevails, it has been and is a dismal failure and a showcase of both waste and inefficiency.
Exhibit A is a whitened sepulcher of bureaucracy innocently labeled “NICE” – the deceptively sweet-sounding acronym for Great Britain’s National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence.
While it may “cover” the Brits universally, it is not nearly as nice in practice as it is in theory, and more closely resembles the proposed “Obamacare” than the programs that have kept me on the sunny side of the sod for, lo, these many years.
Among many other non-niceties in the U.K. are these sobering realities:
– Current breast cancer survival rates there are roughly the same as in Third World countries, in part because NICE has been unwilling to pay for the newer therapies that have remarkably improved the outlook for afflicted women over here, where the mortality risk is lower by half.
– British gents face six times the likelihood of death from prostate cancer than that faced by us in the US of A.
– On a per-capita basis we have access to four times as many CT scans as Britons.
If responsibility for, and power over, health care is transferred to government, it would inevitably lead to federal health boards (maybe Czars) capable of overruling the clinical decisions of private physicians.
Bean counters and bureaucrats, rather than health care professionals, would be empowered to decide exactly how much an extra year of healthy life would be worth, and if therapies and medications didn’t meet their criteria, they would be disallowed, as is now de rigeur in the United Queendom.
The government – not doctors and patients – would decide which therapies and medications are cost-effective in prolonging life – and meeting established budgets.
Defensive medicine (against crippling lawsuits) – already an ugly tumor on the innards of health care costs – would metastasize into withheld treatment and/or deferred procedures. (Ask your doctor if “rationed health care” would be right for you!)
Avenue Queue would be – as it is abroad and in nearby Canada – the most direct route to the physician’s ear and operating room.
Government-sponsored health care programs, first introduced as competitors to private services, would become the strategies of both first and last resort as they bullied their way to single-payer supremacy.
Such “competition” must inevitably lead to massacre when one player in the game both sets the rules and enjoys unlimited access to deficit spending.
Because of its glaring flaws, the “universal” coverage now being touted is almost sure to become much like caviar – ridiculously expensive, relatively inaccessible, and with a taste unpalatable to the average consumer.
Furthermore, both the quantity and quality of professional medical service in the USA would plummet as the superb people who have led the world in therapy, pharmacopeia and research are driven out by minor-league substitutes better able to fit into the molds of rules, regulations, red tape and force-feedings of political correctness.
Surest to benefit are the ambulance chasers, lobbyists and quacks who will thrive on the suffering of patients whose patience will be tried, lives endangered, purses pillaged and descendants horrified when presented with the tab.
In short – although, admittedly, it is too late in this opusedtte to shoot for brevity - what is now a health care system, with which most Americans (reportedly 70%) are satisfied, should be carefully and thoughtfully tweaked rather than torn asunder by the restless and reckless revolutionaries running amok in the whorehouse of government.
Some changes that sound NICE in rhetoric just ain’t so in reality!
Freelance wordworker Joe Klock, Sr. ([e-mail]) winters in Key Largo and Coral Gables, Florida and summers in New Hampshire. More of his “Klockwork” can be found at www.joeklock.com.

http://freemenow.wordpress.com/2009/07/25/the-not-always-nice-approach-to-health-care/

[D-Notice]

1. Wow...

I would say that that is rambling and incoherent, but that'd be giving it way too much credit

[non sociopath skin]

2. Glad it's not just me, DN!

If I gave something like that to my students, I'd get a volley of official complaints.

The Skin

[Captain Hilts]

10. It's not just me. And what on earth do PUMAs have to do with it? Incoherent. nt

[LeftishBrit]

3. This is so confusingly written, that it's hard to discuss

But a couple of points:

(1) According to recent statistics, the UK comes 22nd in the world for life expectancy, and the USA comes 36th. Which doesn't suggest that the USA do better for health care. Most of the countries that do better than the UK have universal public health care; e.g. Canada, which comes 11th.

(2) I am not entirely keen on NICE, though it's better than having everything decided by your insurance company. But let's note that it was set up in 1997. The NHS was set up in 1948. Something that was established almost 50 years after the establishment of universal health care is hardly an inevitable consequence!

[muriel_volestrangler]

4. It has some straight-forward lies in it too

eg "British gents face six times the likelihood of death from prostate cancer than that faced by us in the US of A"

No.

UK Prostate Cancer mortality statistics 24.6 per 100,000 population (age-standardised)

Compared to the North America ones also on that page (as a graph, with the figures available in a link from it): 15.8 per 100,000 population.

So, not 'six times the likelihood'; just about 60% more (I'm assuming the North America figures are in the same region as the US ones; whether or not Mexico is in that North America definition, the USA is still over half of it). Now, that's not good, but it's nothing like the claim that person made.

[TheBigotBasher]

5. I entered the nutters den

BJK of free me now is a very nutty PUMA who although hit hard by life now wants to pick up the hard right of the PUMAs whose "broad coalition" of bigots and bitters are disintegrating.

[dipsydoodle]

6. It doesn't really matter what we think about our NHS

and fuck what some half witted Repug outside the UK thinks about it anyway. The fact is we've got it and in its absense we might not necessarily even being having these conversations - on my part due to my appendix deciding it didn't love me no more 7 years ago.

It's got its weaknesses but I'd say they are mainly due to our NHS contributions being plundered for use elsewhere as is our road tax for example.

[muriel_volestrangler]

7. And, of course, no-one in Britain is stopped from having private insurance

if they want to follow the current for-profit American model. People could buy premiums to insure themselves against having to buy treatment too costly for NICE to be able to justify. But hardly anyone wants to, because the insurers would charge through the nose, and then try to get out of the huge payouts that would be involved if they ever claimed.

When you look at what people in Britain do get private health insurance for, it's basically elective surgery with short waiting lists. And nothing that anyone in Congress is currently suggesting would remotely change the way the USA handles such things (apart from enabling some who are currently uninsured or underinsured to actually get some elective surgery at all), so any comparison they make to the UK for the sake of their current argument is pretty bogus. They should be comparing their current predicament to France or Germany, whose system is closer to some of the proposals.

[dipsydoodle]

8. I finally abandoned my private medical cover

January this year after 20 or so continuous years having never really needed it in retrospect. Aside from that annual age incremental increases become disproportionate. Was a different matter with my wife who died aged 45 Jan '90 from her brain tumour she'd had for 18 months or so - the cost to the private company of that was a huge bundle despite the fact here first op was NHS by oversight.

The main benifit as you say is accelerated speed of treatment but some also prefer private in stay accomodation and maybe better food too.

I think the reference to treatment NICE to being able to justify refers to some of the cancer drugs which are very expensive with only limitedno proven results.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

9. For those of you able to remember the NHS over the long term

(as I infer dipsydoodle can), how has it changed over the years for better or worse?

What effects did Thatcher have? In what ways did New Labour help or hurt?