What can you tell us Yanks about Healthcare in the UK

NHS administrator here. A few points I would like to address, in multiple posts. It's late and I'm tired. Tirade?:

Point 1: Re: profit-driven healthcare.

The NHS is awesome at some things, but I see no reason why it cannot be as easy to use as private care.

Very simple, very obvious answer to this: delicious money.

A tiny proportion of the 60 odd million people living in the UK will ever enter a private hospital. Those that do will, almost without exception, have money behind them, either in the form of an employer insurance scheme or a healthy personal bank account.

So why can't the NHS be more like the Private Hospitals?

Less Patients + More Money means that private hospitals have more time to do more tests on fewer patients.

It means they can buy more beds (and wine!) and better equipment, more often.

It means that they can train more staff more effectively and regularly, ensuring that less bad habits, both clinical and administrative, are picked up and perpetuated, less often.

It means that they can offer higher salaries and thus attract a higher calibre of (and generally younger, more computer literate) administrative staff who engage with that training better.

It means they can pay for more efficiently networked, better maintained Patient Administration Systems that are run on computers and servers which are constantly updated, maintained and renewed by a higher calibre (see above) of IT staff.

And so on.

Private healthcare works like that in the UK because the resources of the Private healthcare system are never stretched, and rarely tested, because they are used, almost exclusively, by this wealthy minority.

And that is why profiteering capitalists in the US champion it, because on paper, private healthcare is great. Everyone wins!

Where private healthcare fails (in the US and, hypothetically, here) is when you introduce** the World's famous Poor People** into the mix.

Poor People famously don't have any money to pay for stuff with, which is problematic when they need a rather complex neurological procedure. And let us make it plain now, that they do need it. We are all human, we all suffer health problems, these problems all need treatment.

Business Man, on the one hand, can pay out of his own pocket for a GP consultation on Tuesday, get a referral sent over to the consultant and hospital of his choosing on Wednesday. Then he can take his employer health insurance monies and go and get the procedure done at London Bridge Hospital the following week. He can again use his Large Salary to independently pay for any follow up appointments with GP as required and for any Big-Pharma drugs that are not covered by aforementioned insurance monies.

Poor Person, on the other hand, can work the same hours as Business Man for a tenth of the pay and, maybe, with some scrimping and saving, purchase a budget individual insurance plan from a company with a business model geared solely towards maximising shareholder profit and CEO pay packets (generally by selling large employer insurance policy packages to companies for which Business Man works).

When Poor Person gets ill, he discovers, after a week or two of paperwork exchanging and listening to ‘hold’ musak on a premium rate phone line, that his budget policy doesn't cover GP consultations on Tuesdays in June, or some thing like that. So he waits another week or two before he can see a GP. When it comes to the consultation, it transpires that he has an underlying condition brought on by something or other in his Poor Person Life that he was unaware of when he signed for this insurance policy, because he couldn’t afford to go to the doctor for a check-up whilst he was doing all that scrimping and saving. And, don’t you know it, that underlying condition happens to invalidate said policy. But he can still go get the procedure done if he pays a bit (£10,000) extra and agrees to an increase in insurance premiums for a few years.

So he does. And he turns up with this (now rather thick) stack of forms and a rather depleted bank account and is promptly given second class service because his record now has all kinds of black and red marks all over it that scream Poor Person. But he is eventually admitted anyway and he is assessed. And unfortunately, during the assessment, that underlying condition rears its underlying head, causes unforeseen complications and, because of the damn limitations of that policy, prevents the complex neurological procedure from ever taking place. Poor Person is promptly discharged Out of Pocket and sans Better Health or Prescription Drugs. And then gets worse and worse etc. [/life].

With the NHS, or ‘socialized medicine’, Business Man and Poor Person are treated almost equally, and both die later, aged 65 in an unfortunate d-lock through windscreen incident. The only disparity in equality is that those Big Pharma drugs still cost Poor Person a pretty penny, because those damn Big Pharma companies keep paying their Legal Teams hefty wages to ensure no one can produce cheap, generic versions of their ‘healing’ products for as long as possible.

And on it goes.

Oh, and lest we forget, Poor People outnumber Business Man about 40 to 1? That's a lot of extra admin.

So, to sum up

profit-driven healthcare - great for the monied few, killer for the massive majority of poor.
socialized medicine - Pro-life, for all.