Posted on 12/18/2010 12:25:54 PM PST by wagglebee
Hundreds of thousands of NHS patients are being denied routine procedures as dozens of trusts cut back on surgery, scans and other treatments in order to save money, a Daily Telegraph investigation has found.
Trusts around the country are refusing to pay for operations ranging from hip replacements, to cataract removal and wisdom tooth extraction.
The health service is also tightening restrictions that prevent patients undergoing procedures for lifestyle reasons.
Smokers and obese patients are being denied operations until they change their habits and trusts are delaying surgery and non-emergency treatments, the Telegraph has found in the most comprehensive snapshot of NHS cuts yet.
The cuts - which include the cancelling of MRI scans and x-rays - are taking place in defiance of the Coalition.
Ministers are determined that front line services should be protected and the savings needed can be found from management costs and efficiencies.
But there is growing evidence that NHS managers are sacrificing patient care instead.
Doctors and nurses said the 'grim' results undermine the 'myth' that front line services are being protected and warned they were just the 'tip of the iceberg'.
The situation is predicted to get worse as the NHS struggles to save £20bn over the next four years.
Although ministers have pledged to protect the health service budget and provide a real terms increase, it will not be sufficient to keep pace with growing demand and increasing costs.
In addition from April next year the amount of money hospitals receive for each type of treatment will be cut by 1.5 per cent raising fears that managers will refuse to provide treatments that they make a loss on.
As part of the investigation, The Telegraph had responses from almost one in three primary care trusts.
(Excerpt) Read more at telegraph.co.uk ...
Doctors and nurses said the 'grim' results undermine the 'myth' that front line services are being protected and warned they were just the 'tip of the iceberg'.
And this is PRECISELY what America has to look forward to under Obamacare.
Freepmail wagglebee to subscribe or unsubscribe from the moral absolutes ping list.
FreeRepublic moral absolutes keyword search
Don’t worry folks. You can still get free health care in Cuba.
A very good argument that can be made in Britain, if not Canada, is that if anyone is willing to *pay* for their health care, they can get what they want from private doctors, which are legal in Britain, if not Canada.
So, for every NHS health horror you hear, just remember that if they wanted *better* care, they could get it. It’s all a matter of priorities.
It was pointed out that in the US, many counties offer free health care to the poor, based on how much money that county wants to shell out for health care for the poor. Yet though it is voluntary, with the payer and the beneficiary, it is generally better than the British mandatory system.
Yes and no. Under the British system if you pay for your own care, you can’t then get care under the socialized system you’re being taxed to support. If you buy care you can afford outside the system, then need care you can’t afford the system says, “sorry, you’re private now, pay for this yourself, too.”
Coming Soon to a Death Panel Near You.
One of the problems in the Canadian health care system is that hospitals have very little idea what many treatments actually cost. They have an inadequate internal “market” price system & often rely on rather crude estimates based on average, rather than marginal costs. Some procedures are under-priced, others grossly inflated. For instance, why should a bed in a recovery unit cost over $1000/day; when you wouldn't be charged more than $100/day for equivalent accommodation in an equivalent hotel, with room service? If you're receiving less than the average amount of nursing care; you're (or, in Canada, the government) being overcharged to cross-subsidize patients, who need a lot of attention.
A lot of this cross-subsidization is deliberate; as hospitals game the system, by charging whatever they can get away with, to make up for losses they sustain by providing other services below costs (because of the government-imposed rate schedule).
So it's sort of like paying to send your kids to private school.....
.....you still pay for public schools -AND- the private school tuition.
.....Only it's worse because you can't go back -AND- it's potentially much more expensive as well as life & death.
Sorry but that’s categorically not true
Well, tell it to the British press. There have been reports of cancer patients facing exactly that problem with the British system.
I ‘went private’ ,as we say, for treatment on my back, not because the standard of care was low but to skip the queue by a couple of months.
I still meet regularly with my NHS practitioner since the operation whenever any problems arise.
Don’t believe everything you read in a newspaper.
That's true, of course, but it's like schooling in the United States. Once you've paid thousands of dollars in school taxes, it's not always easy to come up with private school tuition.
It's a crime to have to pay twice for good schooling or for good medical care.
I’ve a good solution for that.
Ever since the 17th Amendment, the direct election of senators, the States have had no effective way of refusing federal interference, from congress, the president and the bureaucracy, and the courts.
So a constitutional amendment is needed to create a Second Court of the United States. Not a federal court, but composed of 100 legislature appointed State judges. They do not determine if a case is constitutional, because that is the purpose of federal appellate courts. Instead, they decide whether the case itself should be in federal court in the first place, or whether it should be returned to the State of origin.
This would mean that of the thousands of cases that pass through the federal dockets, federal judges could typically consider their constitutionality, first, but then it would be up to the Second Court to decide if the issue was important enough to be there in the first place.
Right now, the federal district courts send up about 8,000 appeals to the Supreme Court every year, of which they can only hear a dozen or two. If they can’t the decision of the district court is final—but also there is the assumption that it should have been a federal case in the first place.
The other purpose of the Second Court of the United States would be to have original jurisdiction over any lawsuits between the federal government and the States. This would mean that first crack at the lawsuit would be by the States, not the federal government, which is inclined right now to take the federal government’s point of view.
More than anything else, a 2nd Court would act like a permanent trimming mechanism against excessive federal growth and overreach. Not just new growth, but existing growth. Thus giving the States the power to reduce the size of the federal government, since it seems incapable of controlling its appetites.
Well, I’m glad to hear it. Is is possible that the report I read was exaggerating some effect on one’s position in a queue for having gone private on some related procedure?
From what I understand UK health care system is the 4Th largest in the world of which 50% of the employees are administrative. A little top heavy I would say.
I wonder if one of their elected reps would get the same treatment as common citizen.
This is the healthcare system the leftists want to bring to America. If they think I’m going to accept this kind of government control in America they can think again!
If you opt out of the NHS for, say, a hip replacement, then the NHS will be only too happy for you to get the job done privately, and come back to the NHS to get your flu jabs, bunions removed, and so on. The same applies to a private provider.
This is because, from a regulatory perspective, the NHS or a private provider prefers to know what your treatment will be, what risks that entails, what drugs will have what effect on your recovery, and how your treatment will affect anything you've been prescribed by them for other conditions that they are still required to treat. So if you're getting the same that they'd offer only in a different setting, then they know where their liabilities begin and end.
If you opt out of treatment offered by the NHS or a private provider for a particular condition, for different reasons - e.g. your provider isn't licensed to deliver, or it suspects that proposed treatment would react with other treatments it's already giving you, or they feel the treatment in question offers no discernable clinical benefit but does carry big risks, that's a different matter. In all those cases either they accept liabilities they have no control over, or they refuse to cover any aspect of the treatment.
You go to your private insurance company and ask if they'll carry on funding your cancer treatment after you've rejected all the "approved" therapies it would cover, in favor of an alternative that it knows nothing about and hasn't "approved". You'll be in the exact same boat as someone in the NHS doing the same thing. Unless you throw big bucks in their direction they will not want to cover you.
To be honest you can take any private industry on the planet and cite a similar thought process indicating that they will support you going someplace else for SOME things, but for other things won't support you at all.
Random example #1: Microsoft won't support SQL Server if you try and install it on Linux. Why should they be commercially liable for their product, if you've made a conscious decision to go off-spec with it?
Random example 2: if you modify your car in certain unorthodox ways, you cannot assume your insurance company or the warranty itself, will cover those modifications. For example, fitting a nitrous kit to a Nissan Micra. Why should either the insurer or the manufacturer be commercially liable for the risks created by your decision to go off-spec?
Bearing in mind, everything was "spec" even in the private healthcare market until the 1930s. It was abuses of the market that led to trial protocols, but even with the overregulation that currently exists, incidents like the TGN1412 tragedy are still going to happen and what we need to do is ensure those incidents are not used to justify adding an even bigger cost overhead to the development of new treatments. It is this, more than anything else, that makes "death panels", possible.
A lot more has to be done to ensure that the drugs companies don't have a tiny window of opportunity to recoup the development costs before the generics flood the market.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.