Tag Archives: Demand

British national health care system prepares to cut 20 billion dollars

Story from the UK Daily Mail.(H/T ECM)

Excerpt:

Millions of patients face losing NHS care as bosses prepare to axe treatments to make £20billion of savings by 2014, a top doctor has warned.

Among procedures being targeted by health trusts are hernias, joint replacements, ear and nose procedures, varicose veins and cataract surgery.

Dr Mark Porter, chairman of the British Medical Association’s consultants committee, warned NHS bosses wanted ‘wholesale reductions in budgets’.

He said primary care trusts – which commission care – are already compiling lists of ‘low value’ operations that would no longer be provided.

[…]Earlier this year the Government’s rationing body said more cuts in medical treatments are planned to save the NHS at least £600million.

Patients could find it harder to get into hospital under plans from the National Institute for health and Clinical Excellence, which advises on drugs and procedures to be funded.

I don’t like this because some people work, and some people don’t work, and then the government decides who gets treated. I think that patients should decide how much they need health care, and make their own decisions about their lifestyles and risk exposure. The NHS systems seems to penalize healthy lifestyles and high earners, while reward the unhealthy and those who choose not to work!

Remember, this is the same NHS that Obama’s health care czar loves! But I don’t like it at all!

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NHS kills a man’s wife by delaying cancer treatment for 7 months

Story here in the UK Daily Mail. (H/T ECM)

Excerpt:

As an experienced GP, Uday Pathak had good reason to trust his instincts and knowledge when his wife became ill.

The 62-year-old suspected she had cancer and urged medics to carry out an immediate full body scan. Tragically, they delayed for seven months and 54-year-old Pradnya later died of the disease.

[…]When the scan was finally carried out at the University Hospital of North Staffordshire, Stoke-on-Trent, it showed Dr Pathak was correct all along.

Despite six months of chemotherapy, Mrs Pathak, a mother-of-two from Seabridge, Staffordshire, died in December 2008. She had been referred to the respiratory unit in May 2007 with a persistent dry cough.

Four months later, Dr Pathak said he raised the possibility his wife had cancer of the lymphatic system. But it was only in April 2008 that a body scan was carried out by the hospital’s haematology team.

Consultant haematologist Richard Chasty, who saw Mrs Pathak three days before her death, said she may have survived if diagnosed sooner.

The horror is that a man works hard as a doctor in a socialist country for his entire life, slavishly paying half his earnings to the government under the constant threat of imprisonment. They take his money and they spend it on other people who may not even be paying anything. And then finally he has need of care. His own wife, who he has sworn an oath to protect, is taken ill.

He turns to the people who have taken hundreds of thousands of dollars of his money and he asks them for help. And they deny him that help, because they have spent his money on sex change operations to change a prison inmate from a man to a woman, and then back to a man, in order to buy votes from coveted special interest groups who demand “equality” with those who are happy with their biological sex.

He is powerless to intervene to save his wife and must watch as his lifelong partner dies right before his eyes. He has no money to afford private care – it was all paid in taxes. He no longer has money to go abroad to the United States to get treatment, and it is in any case too late to try, anyway.

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Single-payer health care is falling apart in Canada

Story from Reuters. (H/T Hot Air via ECM)

Excerpt:

Pressured by an aging population and the need to rein in budget deficits, Canada’s provinces are taking tough measures to curb healthcare costs, a trend that could erode the principles of the popular state-funded system.

Ontario, Canada’s most populous province, kicked off a fierce battle with drug companies and pharmacies when it said earlier this year it would halve generic drug prices and eliminate “incentive fees” to generic drug manufacturers.

British Columbia is replacing block grants to hospitals with fee-for-procedure payments and Quebec has a new flat health tax and a proposal for payments on each medical visit — an idea that critics say is an illegal user fee.

And a few provinces are also experimenting with private funding for procedures such as hip, knee and cataract surgery.

It’s likely just a start as the provinces, responsible for delivering healthcare, cope with the demands of a retiring baby-boom generation. Official figures show that senior citizens will make up 25 percent of the population by 2036.

Ooops. Maybe that whole taxpayer-funded abortions for free thing was not such a good idea for a welfare state like Canada. In their defense, they only have a Ponzie scheme for health care, their retirement system is solid compared to Social Security.

Investors Business Daily explains:

Western dabbling in socialism has shown that public health care systems funded by other people’s money are unsustainable. The provision of “free” care is a losing game. Because it is perceived to be free, demand in such a system will outstrip supply. Costs can’t help but rise.

[…]In 2009, health care spending in Canada devoured 40% of the provincial governments’ budgets and expenditures have been rising by 6% a year. At that rate, or even half that rate, it wouldn’t be long before the provincial governments did nothing but fund health care. The Ontario government says health care spending could consume 70% of its budget within just 12 years.

Some of the blame can be placed on an aging population. Reuters reports that one-fourth of Canada’s population in 2036 will be senior citizens. But it’s the nature of the system, its near monopoly and its ambition to serve every Canadian, that makes it unsustainable. It has grown from 7% of provincial governments’ spending in the 1970s to the 40% it is today merely because it is a government giveaway that people cannot get enough of.

The Cato Institute compares Canada to bankrupt Greece here.

In different parts of Canada, things like in vitro fertilization, abortions, and sex changes are well-funded by the government. They actually restrict the number of doctors in order to ration billing the government for services. Many people cannot even find doctors! People just go on waiting lists for months and months and they die on waiting lists waiting for brain cancer treatment, after having paid into the system for their whole lives! (Because abortions are more important than brain cancer in Canada – it buys more votes, you know).

Related movies on Canadian health care

A Short Course in Brain Surgery:

Two Women:

The Lemon:

And one more video from On The Fence Films called “Dead Meat“.

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