PS

5m out of a total population of circa 70m is nothing to sneeze at ;)

And if you did, you’d have a hard time seeing a doc in person.

PS: Bill H. I hope you are able to improve. That 4 flights of stairs (I assume up, haha) was pretty good.

Alarmist, I was about to paste that whole thing into another post (Part 2-a), but because it is a temporary problem due to the Covid hysteria, confusion, and general stupidity, I'll leave it out, so as to only discuss the general problem with government-run healthcare. Thanks. That was interesting.

PS: Mr. Blanc, the first 60% of your comment is right along the lines of what I will put in Part 3. On the free enterprise part. I guess that depends on how you define it. I would not at all call the huge conglomerate hospital companies a part of free enterprise. They have crowded out the small guys*, and as usual, all the rules made by them and government make it hard to start anything in competition.

Yes, charities ran hospitals, and that was truly non-profit, but "non-profit" is all in the accounting too. It helps a lot when the people are not taxed so heavily and otherwise forced to pay for others for charity to flourish. I'll get to this stuff in that post.

* One of them almost bought all the hospitals in town besides the VA. Then one deal fell through. This is bad for both the customers and employees. For the latter, if you leave on bad terms, you basically have to move for another job.

PS

Here’s something from The Guardian for your part two

—————

Number of people on England’s NHS waiting list tops 5m for first time


The number of people waiting for hospital treatment in England has exceeded 5 million for the first time, highlighting the growing problem of long waits for NHS care.

NHS England’s latest set of monthly performance figures, published on Thursday, show that the waiting list stood at 5,122,017 in April – up 171,720 in a month.

The total has risen from the 4.95 million who were on it in March, which was itself almost 252,000 up on the 4.698m recorded in February – a month-on-month rise of 5.4%.

The number of people being forced to wait at least a year for treatment in hospital, especially surgery, has fallen for the first time in over a year but remains a serious problem. Thursday’s figures also show that 385,490 people have now been waiting more than 52 weeks, 50,637 down on the 436,127 who were in that position last month.

Such long waits are a new phenomenon. In contrast, in March last year – before Covid-19 triggered a suspension of much NHS care – just 3,097 patients had faced such an unusually long delay.

Ministers, NHS chiefs, medical groups and health charities are worried that growing numbers of patients are facing lengthening waits for vital care including cancer treatment, a hip or knee replacement, heart operations and surgery to remove cataracts to improve eyesight.

Thursday’s statistics underline the huge disruption to normal NHS services the pandemic has wrought since last spring and the huge scale of the backlog of care facing hospitals.

Last month’s figures led the Royal College of Surgeons to describe the number of patients now on the waiting-list as “stomach-churning”. It warned that the NHS staff who are under pressure to tackle the backlog as soon as possible were “running on fumes after an unimaginably difficult year helping out on Covid-19 wards”.


Source: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2021/jun/10/number-of-people-on-englands-nhs-waiting-list-tops-5m-for-first-time

PS Having Covid was no fun, but I've been sicker. Temp peaked at 103.9 and lasted about a week. I was down and out for about four weeks altogether. Not eating led to a 15 pound weight loss. Left me with a runny nose 15 months later and I am considerably more short of breath. I used to be able to do 4-5 flights of stairs and only breathing modestly heavy at top, now have to stop and regain my wind after only one flight.

PS With the wonders of modern medicine (yes, there’s a whiff of sarcasm there), demand for medical care will always be greater than supply of medical care. It will always be rationed, one way or another. By price, by waiting time, by a triage doctor, by diversity pokémon points, or by something else. Our choice, or it would be in a more perfect world. In my youth, you had hospitalization insurance. If you were lucky. (It was mostly supplied by your employer; a result of WWII). Hospitals were almost all run by nonprofit, mostly religious, organizations. If you were simply seeing your doctor in his office, you paid cash. When I was going through my late mother’s things some time back, I came across a receipt from the early 1950s for an office call to the family doctor. (Mum saved everything.) $2.00. Someone decided (I wasn’t asked my opinion) that doctors’ visits should be covered by insurance, as well. What’s an office call now? As far as picking your doctor, fat chance. There might be a handful left in private practice, but most of them are wage slaves for medical conglomerates. You get referred to whomever you get referred to. Is this an optimal system? I don’t know. It’s certainly not “free enterprise”. Nor is it state controlled. It’s what those who rule us decided that we should have. Actually, it’s not the system that they wanted us to have. They wanted us to have HMOs, in which choice was even less. But people resisted, so now we have PPOs, where we pay a bit more to have a bit more choice. I never had to use the NHS in the two years that I lived in Britain, so I can’t comment on it. I had to see an ophthalmologist for an eye exam to get my US driving license renewed, for which I paid cash (or maybe my employer paid for it; I don’t recall). I do recall having seen an article in the Economist a couple of years ago which claimed that the only thing keeping the NHS afloat was the Romanian doctors who worked more cheaply than British doctors would. Without a report from a Brit, we’ll have to be in the dark regarding the NHS.

PS: Alarmist, thank you for your take on the NHS. I guess almost all countries are full of people who can't help but "rah, rah, rah, for our side!"

Rex, that is a very good point. I've heard people spout that "human right" thing many times. Your last sentence goes with what I'll write in Part 4 - it's hard to back out of these kinds of things. No one can imagine another and a better way anymore.

Bill, I'm also sorry to hear of your conditions. Did the Covid affect you that much? All that lack of regular treatment for you and others will shorten lives in the medium run. Where does that fit into that "excess deaths" graph? If you are using the VA, I don't know if there are any co-pays, etc, but I do not that my healthcare plan was waiving co-pays AND deductibles (even more important if you're health enough) for people claiming the Kung Flu. It sounds like they wouldn't take you no matter what you said, but then I agree with Alarmist. Even in normal times, the less time spent in the hospital, the better.

PS

@Bill H, Sorry to hear that.

The UK NHS also became a COVID care system. Most routine care visits were cancelled, as were things like cancer screenings. That’s why there were more than a few TikTok videos of empty hallways or with medical staff doing choreographed dances. They prosecuted at least one woman that I know of who had the temerity to walk into a hospital and walk around videoing the empty wards and halls. BTW, COVID was one time where you didn’t see people dying in the hallways because they were dying at home or in the old folk homes. People are now still wait-listed for months to a couple years for routine treatments, so it went from bad to worse.

Not going to the hospital was probably to your benefit, because there was a huge financial incentive in the US for hospitals to push as many people into ICU and onto ventilators and ultimately to death in 90% of cases, and the only thing that slowed them down was a lack of ventilator technicians. I recently saw a video of brand new ventilators still in their original packaging dumped in a landfill ... there obviously no shortage of machines.

PS For all practical purposes, this nation has no health care system. We have a Covid treatment system. If you don't have Covid, you are on your own.

I have Parkinson's Disease. I used to see a neurologist every six months. I have not seen a neurologist in more than two years, and there is no indication when I will see one again.

I have advanced lung disease, with more than 40% function loss in both lungs. I used to see a pulmonologist every 6-9 months. I have not seen one in more than two years and there is no indication as to when I will see one again.

I actually had Covid. I am 78 years old and reported emphysema and prior heart attack. I was told to go home and self isolate. I was not told to see a doctor. I was specifically told NOT to go to a hospital. I was not given a measure of symptoms at which point I should see a doctor. I survived, but it was in spite of our "health care system," not because of it.

We would be better off with the UK's system of letting you die on a gurney in the hallway. At least they acknowledge that there are health conditions other than Covid.

PS The root cause of the problem is the widespread--make that damn near universal--belief that health care is a human right. Given that, and the fact that the proper function of a government is to protect and secure the rights of its citizens, socialized medicine follows logically.

There will not be a free market in health care as long as that belief is paramount. Needless to say, I don't expect that to change in my lifetime.

PS

Let’s just say that the relationship between Brits and the NHS is complicated. I would liken it to Battered Spouse Syndrome. They might not really be so keen on one another any more, but heaven forbid you as as outsider intervene or comment on the relationship.

I watched my friendly English colleagues turn vicious when I commented on people dying on gurneys in the hallways of NHS Trust hospitals, and got an earful about how at least they aren’t dying in the gutter gasping for air like they would in America, ignoring the fact that they were nevertheless dying on gurneys in the hospital hallways ... many gasping for air. At least our dying poor do it in fresh air and sunshine.

I’m privately covered, and I’m curently decamped to the Continent, so I have a little more freedom to choose where to die, including the US, assuming I test negative for the Coof or secure a waiver.