Posted on 05/17/2006 11:07:57 PM PDT by Santiago de la Vega
Patients who are forced to wait longer than doctors would advise for NHS treatment can travel abroad for care and reclaim the cost after a landmark court ruling. The European Court of Justice said yesterday that the NHS must refund the cost of foreign care if patients endure ''undue delays'' for surgery in Britain.
(Excerpt) Read more at timesonline.co.uk ...
It's also a honey pot for lawyers.
I like the quotes put around undue delays. This means anyone who doesn't like standing in line to have his sex changed can come to the US, have it done here, and the British Health Service will pay for it.
This is the end of socialized medicine, which depends on patients dying before the State has to pay for their treatment.
FU Hitlary.
I can't wait to see how this turns out.
read later
The socialized medicine utopians are much closer than you might imagine to getting their way in the US. As costs for family coverage excalates and hospital monopolies expand, the call for government intervention in the remaining pocket of private care increase.
The NHS and other national plans are black holes of fiscal waste that still fail to provide much beyond rountine care; imagine a huge government agency to change automobile oil and check under the hood, while they withhold care from older people and those with poorer prognosis.
My apologies to nitpick on some points, but there are some additional points I need to make of your post. Unlike Canada, in Britain and NZ a parallel private health care system exists for certain classes of surgical treatments or specialized medicines. If you can afford it you can pay for private treatments for things like urology, gynceology, or cardic-surgeries. The only things that are deemed exclusively "public domains" are organ transplants, "sex changes", and emergency medicines (ER).
But it is true that GP visits are subsidized by government generally, although currently subsidization over covers only under 6's and over 65's. One additional important difference between the Canadian model and British/NZ model is that in Canada GPs have NO right to prescribe drugs that are not subsidized, but in NZ or Britain the doctors CAN do so as long as patients are willing to pay the full costs.
Otherwise, most of your posts are spot on.
It will be interesting because France has yet another type of "public" health care scheme different from both the British/NZ/Australian and Canadian models. In France everyone is compelled by law to buy health insurance and they can pick and choose which company he wants. Those who don't generate incomes at all or cannot afford it fully have their premiums paid in part or full by the government's social welfare agencies. When it becomes necessary to undergo a procedure, the patients coughs up the costs and then he is reimbursed at about 70-80% by the insurer. In other words, it is socialized in a sense, but half way private when compared to the British, let alone Canadian model.
Now will the EU step up and work on "harmonizations"?
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Thanks.
Here's a novel idea. Go to school, study, graduate, get a job and pay for your own insurance.
Of course that doesn't fit with the socialist agenda we are dealing with.
I am no friend to the NHS, but we British need to disown the "European Court of Justice". We can make do with British Justice.
Hope that you do it in a hurry. Take a note from the horrible way in which US medicine has gone down, down, down as they bring us socialism.
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