Hey all you socialism-infatuated, big-government-lovin' folks out there who want the United States to follow other nations down the dead-end street of socialized medicine, take a look at how good they have it in the workers paradise of Great Britain.
From the British Daily Mail:
Almost 400,000 patients are still waiting more than a year for NHS treatment, a think tank claimed today.
Government figures showed a rise in the number of patients being admitted for treatment within the 18-week target from referral.
The latest figures, for October 2007, showed 60 per cent were treated in that timeframe, up from 57 per cent the previous month.
But right-wing think-tank Civitas warned the figures were concealing a high number forced to wait far longer.
It said 713,513 (or 18 per cent) of patients needing elective treatment were waiting longer than 36 weeks, with 387,152 (10 per cent) of those having waited over a year.
Wow, the government is trying to get health care wait-times down to only 4.5 months! They must truly care there! Gotta love that government "compassion"!
Our health care system in the U.S. is far from perfect, but I don't think we need to screw it up even further with even more government meddling and end up with this kind of inefficiency.
This is what you get when government does what people ought to be doing for themselves.
3 comments:
I believe the answer is to reduce insurance and medical costs. There is no reason, other than greed, that they are so high and so beyond the reach of so many!
That's right! And a great deal of what fuels that is knowing they can get it.
In a free market, a provider of goods and services can only charge what the market will bear. But with the advent of so much government health care (Medicare, Medicaid, SCHIP, etc.), health care services now knows there's a steady stream of income where the one with the purse strings isn't going to look too closely at the necessity of the spending.
And the proliferation of health insurance just throws another bucket of gasoline on the fire. Insurance companies scrutinize the validity of the charges more than the government, but a lot still gets by them.
And the guy or gal with no insurance is left in the lurch--bigtime!
But the answer isn't more gas on the fire--as nationalized health care schemes like the one in the UK prove--but backing away from that to a more consumer-driven system.
Indeed! If they had to return to the world of competition and offer quality services for reasonable and competitive rates -- we'd all be winners!
Another thing is...
Some doctors and hospitals don't actually try to work with people on bills. Instead, they make unreasonable demands and then rush to turn people over to collection agencies. I'm at a loss to understand how this makes sense.
First of all, aren't doctors and hospitals suppose to be concerned about the well-being of the patients?
Second, how does it make any sense to turn people over to a collection agency that takes a large percentage of whatever is collected on the bill, rather than take small, but regular, payments and receive the entire sum?
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