Coronavirus (COVID-19)

[marshlander]

... Perhaps someone in the UK or in a country with universal healthcare can elaborate more on the limits and the level of care they get. I would assume they're not doing boob jobs and cosmetic plastic surgery.

Happy to answer this one as best I can.

The NHS certainly is no longer the completely free at the point of use service with which I grew up. I remember visits to the GP, hospital, dentist, optician and prescriptions were all free to the patient. Decades ago a small charge was a introduced for prescription medicines, then a standard charge for checkups at the optician and the dentist. Of course those charges have increased. I discovered recently, though, that now I am sixty-five I no longer have to pay for prescriptions, GP and hospital visits remain free to me. Any UK citizen who needs medical assistance can still use most of the health service without charge.

Two or three decades ago our governments started devising ways of outsourcing some of the costs of running the health service; the public sector finance initiative was born and the rot began. The National Health Service has been broken up into local health authorities, which have had their funding devolved to them and they can enter into agreements borrow from the private sector to share the costs (and massively inflated repayments) of new capital projects. Over the past thirty years this initiative, under pressure from any number of think tanks and pressure groups working in the private healthcare and insurance sectors, has expanded to the point where the NHS now has to buy into private healthcare if its own resources cannot provide within reasonable time. Naturally, private healthcare has creamed off the profitable parts of the health service (for example, it is extremely difficult to find an NHS dentist in my area), but the NHS still carries out all functions, especially the less profitable ones. It is also the NHS that picks up the cost of care when a privately funded operation goes wrong. For example when poor quality breast implants burst. The NHS also carries some of the expensive equipment in which the private sector has no wish to invest. This political decision is designed to make the NHS look as though it is no longer paying its way and is opening up the arguments in favour of the vastly profitable private sector.

Our treacherous government has admitted it is moving towards the kind of insurance-based system you have in the States since many functions of the NHS have been sold off to profit-making greedy private organisations. At the end of the year when the Brexit shit really hits the fan we are being led to believe that our only way forward is to enter formal agreements with the USA for medicines and care and that the insurance companies will insist that we find ways to dismantle the NHS altogether. I am glad I am so old I may not have to endure this betrayal for many decades, but I fear greatly for my grandchildren.

I do recommend the John Pilger film I am proud to have helped fund, called "The Dirty War On The NHS". Here is John Pilger talking about the film: