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Scotland's healthcare system doesn't suck!

Since it's a healthcare subject, I just called to do a bit of shameless self-promotion for the July TLA.

Vote early, vote often!

I make great tablet, by the way.... :D

Rolfe.
 
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Mmm tablet. So sweet it sets your teeth on edge, but delicious all the same.
 
Rolfe said:
Chaos said:
Wasn´t there a case some time ago (early this year, I think) where a woman spent 24 hours in a hospital waiting room, most of that collapsed and unconscious, before she died from lack of treatment?
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I've heard one or two stories like that. However, I entirely accept the explanation. Which was that the patient had simply got themselves into the A&E waiting room and sat down. Nobody was alerted to their presence, nobody booked him or her in.
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Umm, no.

The woman, Esmin Elizabeth Green, 49, was taken to the hospital by emergency medical service workers on June 18. She was suffering from agitation and psychosis and was admitted involuntarily, according to the Health and Hospitals Corp.
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She'd already been admitted to the hospital and sat in the waiting room for twenty-four hours before she collapsed.
 
Rolfe said:
Just for the record, next time someone tells you that the Brits have to "stand in line" for months to see an NHS dentist.
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richardm said:
Waiting times for NHS dentists are often so long because there's so few of them left that they're hopelessly oversubscribed. I practically had to wait for someone to die before signing up to my last one.
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My experience is that I effectively can't get NHS dental treatment. I consider it to be de-facto outside the NHS. It must be highly location-dependent. I think I've been private forever (I moved to the UK with my family in the 1980s)

This NHS "dentist finder" throws up a number of practices within a km or two of me, but nowhere near enough to service the catchment. And if one enquires, they are simply capped-out on NHS quotas so there's nothing doing. I'm not aware that this has anything to do with demographics either. The area is densely populated and probably about one third public housing, one third private and the other third business.
 
Been reading this thread through and it's amazing how much the NHS and our OHIP system are the same in terms of coverage and treatments. We have no provincial dentistry here unless you are on welfare or disabled, but most mid to large size employers have drug and dental plans. I work for the gov't so I have pretty good dental and drugs, but my wife who works in the private sector has better benefits.

Our prescription dispensing fee is around $10 now and the cost of the drugs is on top of that. You are always allowed to substitute generic unless the doctor says not to.

There are private clinics here but they are specialized (cancer, hernia, genetics, etc etc) and not GP doctors. OHIP will pay for a private clinic if you can't get timely care in the public system. If you want entirely private care you must head for the USA or Quebec (IIRC) for non-UHC health care.

Anyways I've seen the propoganda ******** on the American TV stations and there technique is simple...find people who fall through the cracks and then trumpet them as typical events. I have a horror story from an American friend concerning her jaw and eyes. She needs some maxillo-facial(sp) surgery to correct a defect in her jaw that makes it very painful to use it every now and then and she has cataracts in both eyes. Her HMO told her the coverage she and her husband have will only cover one operation. Each eye is considered separate surgery.:eye-poppi So her choices are a good jaw and near blindness or one good eye and the same jaw problems. Nice system the Americans have..:boggled: I just got off messenger with them and oddly enough, she and her husband are dead set against UHC :confused: Can't figure that out at all. She works at McDonalds and her husband is self-employed so she provides the insurance. I'd really love to understand the resistance when UHC would provide all the care needed.

Now I am a success story for socialized medicine. I have had two catastrophic events, an accident and an illness that would have surely bankrupted my family if I was in the US. I had a fractured spine in a freak accident and got into surgery in 6 days...then spent a year recovering and a few smaller surgeries (those damn screws HURT!!!!) and of course intensive therapy. I had to ask if they went to Home Depot before fixing my back after seeing all the hardware they had put in there.
Cost to me? $0 and it kept me a hardworking taxpayer rather than leaving me a state-assisted pain-wracked cripple.

Then I had a benign brain tumour. Since it was slow growing and not an immediate threat, I had to wait six months for surgery but I had CAT scans every 3 weeks to make sure the tumour behaved. I had the surgery, had some serious adverse side effects like meningitis and temporary blindness but those socialist doctors didn't quit until I walked out of the hospital and was able to drive home (although I didn't).:) Cost to me? $0 and kept me a hardworking taxpayer rather than a slowly wasting away welfare case. 11 years cancer free because of socialized medicine. 19 years as a productive taxpayer because of dem dadgum socialized gubmint docs:D. You won't be seeing me anytime soon on those propaganda commercials the lobbyists keep showing.

I wonder how an HMO would have treated me if I had to depend on them for my health care? Would they have cut me off after the accident? Both treatments cost the taxpaying public about a quarter million dollars or so.

It's also true that getting a family doctor can be a challenge, but where I live there are numerous clinics where you can walk in at any time day or night if you need to see a doctor.

I've paid a LOT of money in taxes in those 19 years since my accident, about enough to cover the cost of my care. I also have no problems paying those taxes when I have peace of mind all the time concerning my health care and care delivery.

Thanks for the conversation Rolfe and it really made me take a look at the NHS and how it operates.

Go Obama Go, make this change happen....

BTW if anyone is wondering, the accident happened when I was walking backwards using a brand new full sized VHS camcorder. It seems that there are things called curbs (kerbs) that you are supposed to step up and over.:( Oopsie daisy and down I went landing on a concrete sidewalk while in a "V" position with a heavy camcorder on my shoulder. My butt simply wasn't padded enough to provide the necessary protection. Funny thing was it didn't really hurt until a few hours later. Thats when I went to the emergency room when the pain made me see bright white fireballs shooting though my eyeballs. :boggled:
 
Thanks for these stories, Gman. Of course it's the same with the NHS horror stories. Find a few people who fell through the net, and present them as if this is what happens to everyone. Or find a few people who are disgruntled even though they didn't get poor care, or just lie about it.

Of course these people were entitled to care, they hadn't been dumped and they hadn't been refused. And the NHS learns from its mistakes, and things get sorted out. I've yet to hear a US insurance company discussing how to cover the people it currently turns down, or how to ensure that people don't get retrospectively denied care because of a mistake on their application forms....

We have private healthcare too, and private health insurance companies - lots of them. They just cater to the well-off who like the swanky private clinics and so on. The premiums are quite reasonable, because the existence of the NHS means that coverage doesn't have to be so comprehensive. If there was a real problem in the NHS of the scale suggested, you'd find private insurance to be far more popular than it is. I used to have it myself, through my work, but I didn't bother to continue it because my experience of the NHS (and that of my family and friends) has been that it looks after everybody pretty well.

Rolfe.
 
gmanontario said:
I have a horror story from an American friend concerning her jaw and eyes. She needs some maxillo-facial(sp) surgery to correct a defect in her jaw that makes it very painful to use it every now and then and she has cataracts in both eyes. Her HMO told her the coverage she and her husband have will only cover one operation. Each eye is considered separate surgery.:eye-poppi So her choices are a good jaw and near blindness or one good eye and the same jaw problems.
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Now if that isn't rationing, I don't know what is. The NHS would never do that to anyone. If you need three surgeries, you get three surgeries. For goodness sake, what if she had one of her cataracts fixed and then got appendicitis? Should she stay blind and with a painful jaw because she might need her one operation for something really life-threatening?

gmanontario said:
Nice system the Americans have..:boggled: I just got off messenger with them and oddly enough, she and her husband are dead set against UHC :confused: Can't figure that out at all. She works at McDonalds and her husband is self-employed so she provides the insurance. I'd really love to understand the resistance when UHC would provide all the care needed.
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I've been thinking about that, and I wonder. If you have really cruddy service, and you've been told time and time again that the proposed new system will make it all ten times worse, would you want to change?

Rolfe.
 
I was thinking about the cataracts thing. To operate on just one eye would be considered third world medicine here. (Unless of course only one eye was affected.) However, cataract surgery was what my mother chose to go private for.

Why? Interesting tale.

She has had glaucoma for many years, treated medically, until at one checkup her surgeon decided it wasn't under proper control and she needed surgery. This was arranged very quickly, at a local hospital. They did the eyes one at a time, and the ward was full of little old ladies, mostly having cataracts done. Mum was disappointed her own eyesight wasn't miraculously restored as theirs had been, but glaucoma isn't like that.

However, although the surgeon was pleased with the way the glaucoma operation had gone, Mum's eyesight deteriorated further, quite quickly. Further examination revealed that her mild cataracts which were now deteriorating rapidly. Apparently this is a recognised complication after glaucoma surgery. So, when could they do it?

Oops. Thirteen months.

There was a problem. The eye ward was closed. All patients were having to be sent to East Kilbride, and that hospital was barely managing to keep up with the glaucoma operations, which of course were all urgent, and a waiting list was building up for cataracts.

Why was the eye ward in Stonehouse closed? Sterility breakdown. They's had an unacceptable incidence of postopertaive infections, closed the ward, revised all their procedures, and opened again. And still got infections. The problem was that althought the hospital had sterilised its own instruments for decades, this was in the days of Thatcherism and the Free Market as a solution to everything. Whatever happens in America must be The Best. So they had put the instrument sterilisation out to tender, and all the instruments were being taken to Airdrie to be sterilised in bulk, then brought back. That was what had introduced the problem.

So what do you expect if you give the contract for this sort of service to the lowest bidder? Ain't capitalism wonderful!

The private healthcare system in Britain is excellent, in the way that a Porsche or a Rolex is excellent. It's a luxury product for people who can afford it. Nobody skimps on the cleaning to make an extra buck. But as soon as you get into the budget mass market the pressures start to show. If you give a hospital matron a reasonable budget, and she's been trained to be a stickler for cleanliness, it'll get done. If you think you can save money by putting it out to tender, where a private company does the job for even less, while still pocketing a profit, you're in la-la land. But that's what they did.

So there we had it, Mum aged over 80, living alone, and deteriorating eyesight. The odd thing is that now, looking back from ten years distance, it seems relatively trivial. Even if she'd waited, it would all be in the past by now, she'd have had the operations nine years ago. But at the time I was worried. Worried that she'd trip and fall and injure herself. So I persuaded her to have the operations done privately.

The arrangements were quite simple, the surgeon wasn't her usual chap but his colleague whom she liked better anyway, and it was done in a private hospital in Glasgow, both operations done in about two months from first asking as far as I remember. Total cost £3,500. And she still had enough savings left to have her kitchen and bahtroom completely refitted the following year.

So yes, it was terrible that the NHS was going to make her wait over a year. But she had a choice, just as US citizens have, to buy what she wanted on the open market, so she did.

But remember two things. One, if she hadn't had the money, she'd have got the surgery eventually (and looking back, I wonder if we didn't over-react, I suspect she'd have been fine if she'd chosen to wait). She wouldn't have been denied treatment. And two, the reason for the wait was because of one of the bad consequences of introducing competition and the free market into mass-market, budget level healthcare.

Rolfe.
 
Rolfe said:
Now if that isn't rationing, I don't know what is. The NHS would never do that to anyone. If you need three surgeries, you get three surgeries. For goodness sake, what if she had one of her cataracts fixed and then got appendicitis? Should she stay blind and with a painful jaw because she might need her one operation for something really life-threatening?
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Sorry bad wording. She had to choose one of those three surgeries. There was no mention of anything past them.
OHIP would also do all 3 surgeries, although just one at a time especially for the eyes. All she would ever need is a doctor's signoff and then an appointment at the hospital.

She chose to get one eye fixed anyways and is quite happy about it. :confused:

Rolfe said:
I've been thinking about that, and I wonder. If you have really cruddy service, and you've been told time and time again that the proposed new system will make it all ten times worse, would you want to change?

Rolfe.
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Yep and they are what the CT crowd call sheeples. No research or thought, just knee-jerk reaction to whatever they want to hear.

I watched the town hall meeting videos. What a bunch of a-holes at those meetings. Wonder how many HMO paid rabble rousers were there?
 
Oh, one a year or something like that? Not quite so bad then. And they always do the eyes one at a time for medical reasons. I talked to Mum's ophthalmologist about it. He said that post surgery the patient can't use the eye for a period, and the idea is they still have the other one. Also, if anything went wrong, like an infection, the possibility of that affecting both eyes was just scary. So I've escorted Mum to eye surgery four times now!

Rolfe.
 
Have you seen something recent? I can't find anything dated more than a day or two after she went to Sweden.

Rolfe.
 
Rolfe said:
Now if that isn't rationing, I don't know what is. The NHS would never do that to anyone. If you need three surgeries, you get three surgeries.
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The NHS has been known to stick to useing more expensive options on only one eye.
 
Rolfe said:
We have private healthcare too, and private health insurance companies - lots of them. They just cater to the well-off who like the swanky private clinics and so on. The premiums are quite reasonable, because the existence of the NHS means that coverage doesn't have to be so comprehensive.
Rolfe.
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Ahemm..also those who have a employer who pays for it.

An american employer;)
 
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