The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #122219 Message #2687179
Posted By: McGrath of Harlow
25-Jul-09 - 08:33 PM
Thread Name: BS: Nationalized Healthcare, good? bad?
Subject: RE: BS: Nationalized Healthcare, good? bad?
We've got private medical insurance here too, Doug. Of course it has to offer a good deal in order to compete with the NHS. If the American private insurance schemes aren't able to survive in competition with a government scheme, that's a sign they can't be offering a good enough deal. The good schemes would survive and get better. The rotten ones would go under, and good riddance.
I can't see why anyone would want to go to America to get quicker treatment, - if the are in a position to pay privately to get treatment more quickly, they can do it here too.
No doubt there are cases where the state-of-the-art in some particular field is better in the States (and there are cases where the same would apply in reverse).
But what would never happen here would be a case like that Don Firth just mentioned, about the lady denied cancer treatment because of the small print in her insurance. And there wouldn't be any waiting around to see a specialist either - here is a chart showing how local hospital trusts throughout England measure up to responding to a referral for suspected breast cancer.
You really do seem to have been sold some very strange notions about public and private health services in the UK, Doug.