The Price You Pay For Socialized Medicine

by John Hawkins | August 8, 2005 3:05 am

You ever been in pain?

Not minor pain, like a skinned knee or extremely intense agony, like the sort caused by a broken leg, but something inbetween?

Pain that’s bad enough that it drastically cuts into your quality of life and just makes life miserable for you?

Now imagine feeling like that, hurting like that, and knowing that there’s a fix for it — but — and this is a huge but — finding out that you’re going to have to wait an entire YEAR to have it taken care of properly.

That would be horrible, wouldn’t it?

Well, if you lived in Britain, where they have the sort of “wonderful” socialized medicine that Democrats want to bring to this country, you wouldn’t have to imagine that horrible situation. To the contrary, if we ever have government run healthcare in this country, this[1] is the sort of thing that will likely happen here as well:

“HE has to wait 17 weeks just for an appointment. Then he has to wait at least another nine months for an operation in the UK.

So British mum Karen Knott, who couldn’t bear to see her 14-year-old son, Elliot, in pain has decided to fly him to India for an operation.

…Her son is suffering from spondylolisthesis, a condition which developed after he injured his back while ice-skating. It is caused when a vertebra slips out of line and presses on a nerve.

Elliot can barely stand and has to be helped around his home near Dorchester. He was due to begin his GCSE courses next term, but has had to stop attending classes because of the pain.

His local hospital does not carry out the procedure and referred him to Southampton General Hospital.

But since the referral, he has not been seen by a doctor.

After making inquiries about going private, his parents, who are both design engineers for Westland Helicopters, discovered that the operation could be carried out in India for 4,700.

Elliot and his mother fly out on Tuesday and will be in India for 18 days.

…’It is the worst age for something like this to happen (to Elliot). He is still growing and active, and about to start his GCSEs,’ said Mrs Knott, who has another son, Ryan, 10.

…A spokesman from Southampton General Hospital said: ‘Even though our waiting times are within the national levels it is difficult when you are the person affected.

‘Staff who have these specialised skills are in short supply and a lot of their time is taken up with emergency cases.'”

You know what they say about getting things for free? “You get what you pay for.” That’s something people should keep in mind when liberals start talking about how great it would be to have “free” healthcare in this country like they do in Europe and Canada…

*** Update #1 ***: From the comments section: another story about the joys of socialized medicine:

“Living in the Netherlands (where starting next year private health insurance will be banned, no matter what the propaganda flyers call the scheme) I understand all too well and from experience in my family.

My mother was diagnosed with an unknown growing object in her abdomen which was pressing on her urine tubes and bladder in february 2002.
She was told she needed emergency surgery, not just because she was in constant pain and could not shed urine, but because doctors feared it was a fast growing cancer.

She was told that there was however a waiting list for the surgery required that would mean at least a 3 months waiting period (remember this was AFTER the surgeons and everyone else agreed this was an emergency!).

Lucky for her she could go into hospital 2 weeks later after someone on the waiting list died and her doctor pulled some favours to get her priority treatment.

Not that it ended well, as errors introduced by misplaced costcutting measures meant she was in hospital 9 months instead of 2-3 weeks and lost her left food(sp) in the process.

We didn’t sue the hospital btw., they admitted to the mistakes and offered to pay all expenses (had they not done so there’d have been hell to pay, though in our system it’s unlikely there’d ever be a verdict as medical cases are treated by special courts made up solely of doctors who all protect each other as next time it could be them under charge…).

by jwenting on 2005-08-08 05:13:35″

Endnotes:
  1. this: http://newpaper.asia1.com.sg/news/story/0%2C4136%2C92703%2C00.html

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