Ladies and Dudes,
Just a quick off-the-cuff response on the issue with health care that was started on a friend's Facebook account. (Since I 'surrendered' my Facebook privileges earlier this year, I thought it best to move the issue here...so have a gander, don't laugh too hard at my 1st draft grammar skills, share your convictions, argue with me [but be cool please!] or whatever strikes you. Your call.)
I’ve read with interest regarding the debate over socialized Health Care from afar here in Great Britain. As the developing world goes, America’s pejorative ‘older brother’ across the pond may offer ‘clues’ over what to expect if socialized health care is approved. To clarify, the United Kingdom (more specifically, England) has historically, before America, taken the first ‘steps’ towards many of today’s freedoms and social advancements worthy of mention; (abolishing slavery, granting women the right to vote, discontinuing capital punishment, and socializing health care.) [I’m at least sure there is NO debate over the efficacy of the first two ‘advancements’…]
Though the concerns are understandable and I’d like to take a few moments here to explain how socialized Health Care has affected my family and friends during our combined 5-years living here.
The NHS has made the cost of the birth of my two children…free. (Or at least that cost has been incrementally ‘melted down’ and collectively shared by myself, and the fine tax-paying citizens of the UK.)
I’m a fairly ‘private’ person by nature so it may come as a bit of a surprise to share here that during my son Corin’s first year, he developed an infection that required immediate care. Twice we rushed him to the NHS hospitals seeking assistance for his anguishing ailment. Twice we were told that his condition would require minor surgery to alleviate it. Just a simple non-threatening procedure and all would be fine.
We waited for over a year for this ‘minor surgery’ to resolve his infection. We knew that in the United States the procedure would’ve been scheduled within a week of the first instance and resolved before the following week’s time. But the NHS, despite its advantages, was making us wait, for reasons that were never clear to us, a whole year. During that time, my son's suffering increased. From me all I could offer was a blessing of comfort and love. During that time, two further emergency visits (one memorably on Halloween during his first Trick-or-Treating experience) were required to treat my son’s condition where we were again told to wait. So for a whole year, helplessly we waited. And waited.
As the scheduled date drew closer, my wife and I booked time off of work, rearranged our schedules to allow time for him after the procedure. (During that time, we tried in the best way we could to explain to our 2 year-old ‘what’ was going to happen…and I have found explaining ‘pain’ to a 2 year-old one of the most difficult things in fatherhood.) With schedules in place, our anxieties stretched thin, one week before the scheduled procedure for our son…the NHS sent us a simple letter informing us that the year-long scheduled procedure…was postponed for an additional 6 more months…with no explanation for this! (The ‘new’ date was, in a further ‘slap’ now scheduled to coincide on my wife’s birthday.)
So, despite our ire, we waited again the full 18 months for the NHS to perform a 25-minute procedure to resolve an infection with my son that would have been resolved in a fraction of that time in the US.
I’m now happy to say the surgery was a success and that our son has made a full-recovery. But when he cut his lower lip horsing around in our living room the next year…requiring a single stitch to his lip…the downside with the UK’s NHS would again be abundantly clear. Our local 60 million pound hospital --despite being full of NHS-paid doctors refused to apply the stitch and told us the procedure was done in the neighboring town hospital 20 miles down the road. So, we took an expensive taxi ride to the hospital where my son was to sit in a waiting room for over 4 hours with a bloody lip (which was dripping all over their ER.)
After the 4 hours, the staff then told us that they in fact did not have the required ‘specialist’ available to apply the single stitch and that we would need to go to another hospital an additional 20 more miles down the road. Would the NHS foot the bill to transfer us to another hospital? Of course not…and another taxi ride was required (we would spend 52 pounds—over $75 on cab fare alone to the two hospitals.)
After another 4 hours in another hospital, we were finally ushered in. But the doctor at this hospital didn’t want to apply the stitch and tried to convince us to wait until the next evening on the following day to see someone else because [and I quote] he “hadn’t had as much experience applying stitches” as his colleague.
Could you believe it? One simple stitch, three hospitals later, over 50 quid in travel cost and the NHS-paid doctors were now trying to send us away with our son’s mouth caked with [now] dried blood on his wound. It was there that we had to NEGOTIATE with the doctor to apply the stitch then and there. That’s no joke! We actually had to insist that the doctor apply the stitch! So with no anesthetic, the stitch was eventually applied (despite my son’s shrieks) and he looks fine.
When I was my son’s age, I gashed my forehead at a drive-in theatre and less than 30 minutes later I was sewn up with 5 stitches and back at home…and that was in 1977!
Now the NHS has been good to us, but it’s also been a pain in the butt as well. And we have seen others suffer as a result.
Two years ago we attended the funeral of a work colleague of my wife (held in the same church where Shakespeare is buried), a mother of two in her mid-forties. We sang hymns, we cried, we gave flowers and marked the August occasion with hugs and conciliatory grief. In the woman’s courageous honor to the cancer that took her and her tremendous spirit in the face of death--(she was still doing cancer walks and hikes just weeks before she died) we named our daughter after her.
So what happened?
Jane had been visiting with the NHS for years complaining of stomach pain…and her health issues were often discussed at length with my wife. Each time, full-examinations were never forthcoming--[in fact she was advised that they were not necessary] and her ‘pain’ was temporarily alleviated through prescribed medication. (If you’ve ever lived in the UK, one thing the NHS does VERY well is prescribe medication to treat literally everything…for reasons that, on occasion are a bit dubious.) So the pain continued, and in lieu of wider, more-expensive/expansive examinations, Jane was told that her ‘discomfort’ was treatable.
And so the months rolled on. And the pain increased…until it was too late. When her health predicament became obvious to even the untrained medical eye, Jane was given mere weeks to live in an inoperable cancerous condition. The bitter side was even more crushing as she was eventually told that had her cancer been detected earlier, her life might’ve been spared. Too little too late.
We were a bit astonished that there wasn’t a deeper sense of outrage for the failings of the NHS in this affair. There seemed to be acceptance that people live and die in this life and when it’s your time, it’s your time. Perhaps there’s something in the saying that ‘familiarity breeds acceptance’.
[This also happened to the wife of one of my professors at my college a couple years ago…who for months complained of back pain, which was medicated, only to discover that it was cancer all along which when diagnosed gave her only 3 weeks before she died.]
These are some of the experiences we’ve had and observed with the NHS here. The NHS isn’t evil. It’s not some Stalinist program designed to take away each others' rights. But over the years, by declension, it has devolved into a bit of a joke. It’s now in need of a serious overhaul. And one of the many blunders here of the NHS is the ethos of ‘treating’ the symptoms rather than ‘preventing’ them. Preventable care seems to be the bastion in the private sector for health care.
Now I don’t want to beat up on Obama. I didn’t vote for him, but then again I wouldn’t have voted for the feckless McCain either. Love him or hate him, Obama is our president and is trying to ‘fix’ our nation’s health care…and I think it needs some attention and some type of option for everyone is a dignified and humane endeavour. But the bill is [reportedly] over 1,000 pages long. I haven’t read it. You haven’t read it; [have you cover-to-cover?] Most of our politicians haven’t read it either. I have questions and concerns like anyone else. I don’t know if there will be ‘death panels’ or not.
But how people can so blindly abdicate their right of being ‘informed’ to one party’s claims on a document that they themselves haven’t read is remarkable. Whether or not you’ve carried a gun to a town hall meeting, bit the finger off an old man or not is beside the point. Though I don’t know what the long-term implications of foisting a socialized health care program on the US will be, I do however know from experience some of the ups and downs from socialized health care here.
Maybe the US will be smart enough to avoid the problems here. Maybe not. (In fact, judging by history, probably not.) I don’t know if the purported millions of illegal aliens residing in the US will have access or not. But there are questions to be asked in a dignified manner and judging by the track record of the NHS here, there ought to be sufficient pause. Some pause is good. Too much pause is procrastination. Something needs to happen...
