Guess What? Socialism Kills People
It’s often been our contention, as vehement critics of socialized medicine and its supporters like Moore, that all government healthcare provides is the same equally shitty service to everyone. (Except, of course, the wealthy, who can pay for their own treatments.) As usual the Times of London lays it out.
The National Health Service is providing dying cancer patients with drugs that are five times less effective than those available privately and is refusing to treat them if they try to buy medicines themselves.
That’s right, folks. If you decide to use your own money to pay for the life-saving drugs that your free healthcare system doesn’t provide, you’re shit out of luck on any future treatment. Their policy is, “Use our substandard care or you’re on your own.” Ah, compassion.
One drug for kidney cancer, routinely available through public health systems in most European countries but not to British patients, can reduce the size of tumours in 31% of patients, compared with just 6% of those prescribed the standard NHS drug.
The growing row over “co-payments” has prompted the government to reconsider the ban. Alan Johnson, the health secretary, has promised a “fundamental rethink” of the policy.
Just not a fundamental rethink of the socialist disaster which created the problem in the first place.
A woman with bowel cancer is fighting for the right to pay for a drug that could extend her life long enough for her to spend Christmas with her grandchildren.
Sheila Norrington, 59, a former NHS medical secretary from Maidstone, Kent, has been told by doctors that if she buys the drug Erbitux, which the health service will not pay for, she will lose her state-funded cancer care. Erbitux is the only drug capable of treating her advanced bowel cancer.
Norrington’s husband, Goff, 61, a former sales manager, said: “We have been told that if we pay for it ourselves we will be thrown off the NHS completely and we will need to pay for everything privately. We are devastated. This is not going to cure my wife, but if it keeps her alive a little bit longer, then we would pay for it.”
The couple say that although they could pay for a few cycles of the drug, which costs about £3,000 a month, they could not pay for all Norrington’s care, including scans, blood tests and consultations.
Goff Norrington added: “We have two young granddaughters and this could make the difference between sitting round the table with them at Christmas or not. We think it is deplorable that patients can get this drug almost anywhere in Europe but we cannot get it in the UK.”
A spokesman for Maidstone and Tunbridge Wells NHS Trust said: “We are governed by Department of Health policy on this issue.”
And why shouldn’t they be? The government is the one paying for it. They aren’t concerned with individuals, they’re concerned with doling out their limited resources in the most compassionate and fair manner, which in this case is simply letting people die.
A poll for The Sunday Times shows strong support for allowing co-payment in the National Health Service, with 89% saying that people who buy additional cancer drugs should continue to get free NHS treatment.
Only 5% think allowing co-payment would create a two-tier NHS. Until now this has been the position taken by Alan Johnson, the health secretary.
Ministers had feared that allowing co-payment would upset less well-off patients, but the YouGov poll of nearly 1,800 people shows strong backing across the social spectrum and supporters of all three main parties.
This, of course, begs the question. If compassionate free government healthcare can’t provide, y’know, actual healthcare to patients, and they are forced to paying massive amounts of money to buy their own treatments, maybe the solution to the problem is less free government healthcare and more private sector solutions.
Wow, paying for healthare. What a concept!
Comments
Well, it seems socialised medicine kills people. Although I’d like to point out that if you can’t afford health care, and you have a serious illness, well, that’ll kill you too.
Not really, ogden. We generally call that a case of “going into debt”, which while difficult, is not fatal.
Indeed Rann Aridorn.
And as Barbara Wagner proved, for the truly desperate, there are options.
I’m just glad that she was allowed to accept help from a third party...in many places where there is government provided health care, just aid would be illegal or there are sincere attempts to make such things illegal.
For such aid or any additional options, weakens the ‘free’ health care system, which isn’t free, nor is ever guaranteed to be available when you need it as many citizens in other nations have discovered as they are forced to sit back and have the state murder them while they wait for treatment that will not come in time.
I am in England and can honestly say that if I had cancer I would want the best possible treatment and yes the case outlined above is unfair and is under debate in Britain at the moment. All left and right wing commentators feel that it is absurd that people wishing to contribute towards their own medicine forfeit their right to some free care. However the accepted solution to this is to provide the best care possible through the NHS rather than taking apart a system that works (despite some obvious flaws in some cases.)
The debate in the UK centres not around destroying but improving the system to allow for the best care for everyone and you would be hard pressed to find anyone in the UK who wished to have a totally private healthcare system.
The fact is we have choice in the hospitals we can use in most cases and in the doctors we can see. If I am concerned about my childrens health I can go to any one of three hospitals within 20 minutes driving distance and get them looked at without worrying about them checking my insurance first. I have a choice of numerous doctors I can register with and if I don’t like one opinion I can see another and get treatment in a reasonable time scale.
I accept that if I stub my toe I will wait longer than if I am having a heart attack regardless of how big my pay packet is. Also if I want to pay for private healthcare I can but personally I feel no need for it.
The NHS does not murder people with healthcare that ‘doesn’t come on time’ and I find it offensive that badly informed misguided people can say this just to score some sort of political point. The NHS does all it can and as with private healthcare is not perfect but it does have a budget and since the privatisation of much of the NHS individual health authorities now have to balance their books as with any business. They are forced by politicians to justify their spending and at times this restricts some drugs and treatments that with an open checkbook may be made available and as I said above the debate is not getting rid of the system but funding it through more of the taxpayers money.
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I found this article interesting as well. The “compassionate” health care system in Oregon is entirely willing to compassionately help pay for a woman to commit suicide, but won’t pay for the treatment she needs to stay alive. It’s cheap to let people die or to just murder them. It is taking the will of an evil drug maker to help keep her alive.
A GIFT OF TREATMENT
When the Oregon Health Plan fails to cover a cancer drug, the drugmaker steps in
By Tim Christie
The Register-Guard
Published: June 3, 2008