On the subject of healthcare I'm not so keen on jumping the gun for public healthcare. As great as free health care for everybody for just slightly higher taxes sounds on paper the actual practice may not be so grand. British citizens definitely have higher taxes than U.S. citizens will probably ever have due to the fact taxes support the monarchy and their £100m a year paycheck. (This translates to around $160,000,000 a year) (Cited Here)
I'm not going to pretend I know everything I'm talking about but this is just what I've taken in since being here. Much of this we have talked about in our British Life and Culture class.
Tax brackets for the UK can be found here.
If you don't feel like checking that out right now I'll give you this one: GB citizens earning £37,401 - £150,000 a year pay 40% income tax, and the next highest bracket is 50% tax. (Note though that average income a year is much closer to £22,000/year) For Americans this is around $60,000 a year, like Britons slightly higher than the national average income. (Here is the income tax brackets for Americans) If you don't want to take a look there basically the same people who are in that $60,000 a year bracket are paying 25% tax.
Now as I've been subject to public health care over here. And okay the 2 hour wait with excruciating pain and puking may have been worth it to get off with a prescription the whole total of which only costing about £7. Ignoring the fact the prescription didn't actually do anything for me, and ignoring the fact that I don't have to pay taxes here this was great.
However the National Health Service (NHS) isn't all that it's cracked up to be.
I read this article in a newspaper today. It was not easy to track down since it wasn't on the website of the newspaper I read it from. Basically it talks about a student from the US but studying here in England died after an asthma attack. She told her friend to call an ambulance, the friend went into an NHS where she was told she should call an ambulance. Studies are being done to see if she would have died had she gotten care immediately.
This story highlights 63 unexpected deaths in NHS all due to different things at approximately 5 different NHS hospitals.
Stories of regular people not bad enough? How about elderly patients? This sad story talks about several different elderly patients suffering not only from their ailments but poor nourishment (actually being left without food and water), being left in soiled clothes, and in pain.
Another article refers to the confidence of NHS nurses. Nurses and other health practitioners are suffering from underemployment. There are not enough funds to keep around a full staff so the rest must work extra hard to run at high capacity. And with most people using the NHS over private healthcare organizations it's not wonder they have to work so hard.
This article I wanted to share just because it's rather shocking and sad. Once again I had a hard time tracking this one down from where I originally read it. Because of several mistakes by the doctor, a man, who was donating a kidney to his father, experienced kidney failure in his other kidney and needed a kidney transplant.
Most of the complaints for the healthcare relate to the elderly like this one. That article shares some horror stories to the ones mentioned above as well as others in more detail.
Please note that not all of these articles are from the same biased news source hating public healthcare. Also these stories do not occur at the same hospital or care giving facility, however they are all under the NHS. One must wonder that it's not a problem with doctors or nurses or even the hospital, but the system.
I am not condemning the NHS, however, America: Take note.
We study history to learn from the past so we will not make the same mistakes. This history is taking place right here, right now. Learn from it and don't make the same mistakes.
4 comments:
Wow, somebody has really done their homework!!!
Gee, I hope you are feeling better!
You have to keep in mind that someone picked through cases and reports and used the ones they found involving NHS. I'm sure there are tons of other cases involving private health care hospitals, probably outnumbering London's NHS cases in America within the same time frame. Everything cited here sounds more like a severe lack of medical training/malpractice. The biggest problem I can see within an NHS system is short staffing and maybe even a lack of interest in medical jobs. I doubt NHS practitioners could haul in the kingly sums of cash that private practitioners do. Which could also explain the malpractice assuming the private health care industry gets to pick through the best doctors and leaves the rest for NHS. Sounds like a vicious cycle. I personally am in support of a NHS plan in America. Second rate is better than nothing. I haven't had health insurance in probably 10 years. A basic physical would probably do me some good but I don't personally have the $200-$500 dollars it would cost.
That is a good point. There probably are plenty of cases like that and worse in the US that don't get showcased. And a lot of the time here it probably is doctor training and what not, but I wish there was a better way. I don't want to have to pay almost half my salary in taxes just so that a bad doctor can take care of the elderly not very well.
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