Why would some people want American style healthcare?

[FishCanFly]

I mean, to abolish the NHS for extortionate private insurance?

We are lucky here in Sheffield as we have excellent teaching hospitals nearby and some amazing medical staff here as a result.

And yes, maybe I have been lucky at times too. But I've had a number of encounters here and it's always been great with lovely staff who care. I have had delays and sometimes frustrations but never really that bad when you get time to reflect back after it's all sorted.

We've been fortunate with family and friends too who have accessed great medical service in our city, and have friends who are Nhs staff who really care.

I wouldn't want the American system but the NHS does need to change drastically.
Over the past 20 years I've seen a huge waste of resources and it seems to be getting worse. Records are often lost, appointments missed because of mistakes. The IT system needs overhauling.
Some workers take advantage of bad management and get away with not doing their job properly for years.

There is a particular department that advertises when you visit that there was 14000 missed appointments the previous month and for patients to call if they were going to miss the appointment as it costs the NHS ££s for every missed appointment

The reason is the appointment has gone before they have even sent the letter out informing you.

It lists the dates each dept it goes through has it.

By the time it goes through to typing the appointment has already gone.

I think surely someone must have 1/2 a brain to realise filling out an appointment letter putting it in an envelope and sending it out when the appointment has gone is a waste of everyone’s time and money

My mother has cataracts and was waiting for an eye appointment. After 4 months she had a letter from hospital saying that as she'd missed 2 appointments they wouldn't offer any more until she'd seen her GP and been re-referred.
Turned out they'd sent the letters to her previous address. She'd moved 10 years ago and had hospital letters sent to her current address over that time. Also the correct address would have been on the GP referral letter.
Have also heard of others it's happened to.

@SinittasDancers a lot of people don’t need healthcare from the NHS. For example we have private health insurance. Why should we pay more for doing the right thing? Or young people- they tend to be quite healthy and require little to no medical attention. They are also the ones who will earn the least proportional to their level of education. Why should they pay for something they aren’t even using? Having two systems had the benefit of incentivising people to make good choices like going private or maintaining their health without punishing those who aren’t well off.

The reason is the appointment has gone before they have even sent the letter out informing you.
And yet they just carry on doing it .

Something has to change.

@velveteenfruitbowl that's a brave assertion. I'm afraid to tell you that it's extraordinarily unlikely that you won't need extensive healthcare at some point in your life. Before I became ill I was extremely healthy and fit, ate well, exercised, didn't smoke. I had no way of knowing that I would become chronically ill and nor do you.

Do you actually think that people like me should be punished for not going private or 'maintaining my health' (my illness, like many, is not preventable or predictable)?

By paying for private health insurance you're already paying for something you're not using. By the way, if you're in an accident or need urgent care you won't be treated in a private hospital regardless of your health insurance. You will be taken to an NHS hospital in an NHS ambulance. Urgent/emergency healthcare makes up about half of hospital activity.

Yes re my post on p5. The best and worst of NHS in this case. Entitled to treatment as ordinarily resident in UK via her work visa. It was obvious she had come here to access the NHS. Her treatment ended up costing the NHS a few hundred thousand. The NHS cured her when the US system would have let her die. She was used to having weekly unnecessary blood tests while still under US system and it took her a while to accept that we don’t do unnecessary stuff. She was pretty ungrateful at the time actually.

These cases are small numbers though. The service is straining at the seams, mostly because of an ageing population who are living far longer than nature intended. Prescription costs are phenomenal and wards packed to rafters with elderly patients who would be better off in the old cottage hospitals, long since closed.

I would prefer For us to have a European style system. Frankly, I work with the NHS daily, and it’s a god-awful mess. It’s inefficient overly bureaucratic and it is not providing a good service. If I did my job as badly as the people I have to work with, I
Would have been fired years ago.

I have had very good experience with US healthcare. But i think a safety net is needed for the diabetics and others that the US leaves to die.

I completely agree with the point about the cottage hospitals and the taking up of beds.

What about nhs dentistry? That's an example of how it's part funded by the patient... think it's working?

slartibarti we have a similar system screw up here. Ds was due a consultant appointment (that we’d waited over a year for) last month. On the day of the appointment we get a phone call, the consultant is off I’ll but they’ll send us a letter to reschedule. Instead we get a letter telling us we missed the appointment and how much this costs the NHS. If we want another appointment we need to get another referral from the GP . Also got a phone call from receptionist of GP saying ‘I’m 99% sure you missed this appointment as Consultant was off sick but I’ve been told to call everyone who missed their appointments’, so costing even more time for them.

@SinittasDancers who made the assertion that they would never need medical care? I am also aware that there are no private A&Es in Britain (happy to pay if we use them). I am also aware that there are some specialist methods only available in NHS hospitals (as I’ve donated to a research hospital near me which is one of the few good hospitals in this country) although if a pay at access system were put in place both those costs could be picked up by insurance. Not only does that mean those services are better funded, it also means that for cases where patients are insured the full cost could be recouped.

It’s much much fairer to charge people who actually use the services.

The only good reason to raise the money through income tax is that it would be cheaper to collect.

I would be absolutely stuffed if we had an american style health care system. I have a lousy health history and have already been refused by my works insurance provider.

If a provider had to insure me it would cost me a bomb - which currently I'm already paying for my home (not everyone gets paid the national average....)

If a provider had to insure me it would cost me a bomb

@catwithnohat that may be the case with an American system but nobody here is advocating that

It's not the case with in the American system. No one can be turned down for insurance

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guaranteed_issue

and your medical history has no impact on what you pay:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_rating

Many who want it would benefit hugely from it (rich people who could afford stakes in it). I have no idea why ordinary people would back it.

MadeUpMyMind, call the consultants secretary and explain and insist on being put back on the waiting list with your original referral. If no joy, go through PALS. That is ridiculous but probably an oversight.

AlphaBravoCharlieDelta

You were lucky that it was eventually diagnosed.

Dps cancer despite actually asking if his symptoms (complete list of what to look out for if you have bowel cancer) were bowel cancer and the fact that his father died from bowel cancer was diagnosed with constipation, a hernia, stress, possible stomach ulcer. Towards the end every time he went back he got a prescription for stronger and stronger laxatives as they wanted to cure his constipation.

He had a huge abscess on his spleen which made his stomach stick out more on one side.

One doctor tried to wrestle this abscess back into him as they thought it could be a hernia.

I have been to the doctors and the guy has gone onto Google to look up symptoms.

Dgf died of a heart attack a few hours after a doctor sent him home with a prescription for Rennie type pills saying that he was definitely not having a heart attack after presenting with a crushing pain in his chest, pins and needles in his left arm and feeling nauseous and being sick.

Someone I know was locked up onto the psychiatric ward (0ne of the old wards that housed old women with dementia who spent the night either trying to get into bed with her or trying to fight her) just after giving birth because she complained that one of her legs was swollen and didn’t look right.

Dr thought she was completely mad and separated her from her new born

Her dh actually punched the dr in order for her to get released and paid privately for another dr to examine her. She had a blood clot in her leg and if it had moved she would have died.

The fact the NHS dr didn’t press charges I think was he knew he would have faced worse given his failure to actually look at her leg.

The list of failures that my family and people we know have had to endure from the NHS is very long and we try to avoid the doctors as much as possible.

@helenadove that’s ridiculous them not properly investigating, diagnosing and treating the cause, there must be one! Surely also that would have been cheaper than prescribing all those meds and all the gp appointments

Over the years I’ve had good and bad treatment in the nhs.

Allergies and lung infections as a child which I was unfortunately prone to were swiftly diagnosed and treated.

I’m asthmatic and if we’d had a USA model my family would probably have really struggled to pay for my treatment and preventive meds.

Couple of minor accidents as a kid but necessitated a&e visits and follow up treatment which again under USA model parents would have struggled to cover.

However, also 14 years of ignoring classic endo symptoms which if I’d been referred to Gynae far earlier could have prevented ovarian torsion and 2 mc inc partial ectopic as well as many years of suffering “milder” symptoms of chronic pain, heavy bleeding, anaemia, migraine, nausea, fainting etc. I feel certain that a referral, diagnosis and treatment would not only have greatly reduced my suffering but would have been much cheaper overall than the cost of all the gp appointments, prescriptions for meds to treat the symptoms and several surgeries.

It’s the short sightedness and illogical approach which pisses me off.

I was also “cleared” after my car accident as x-rays showed no bone damage but x-rays can’t check for soft tissue or nerve damage which took several months to be acknowledged and I still don’t 13 years later have an agreed dx for let alone treatment. I’m only 47 but in pain every day and in last couple of years have noticed a deterioration in mobility and in things like I can’t reliably grip with my hands. Also since the accident (and it was actually someone else and not a hcp that noticed the timing of this and suggested a possible link) I have had problems with becoming allergic/having bad reactions to medications I had taken without any problem for years prior to the accident. This person and others have signposted me to relatively new research that shows that trauma even minor to certain organs can cause problems like this, yet I cannot get anyone in the nhs to take my concerns about this seriously enough to even discuss it properly.

I also suffer badly with mh issues, again the lack of co-ordinated care means I am much worse than I was even when this all started with a “breakdown” shortly after the accident. My main condition (but certainly not the only one) is ocd, for which there are recognised ideal ways of treating BUT the various different treatments are supposed to occur at the same time to tackle it properly. Again in 13 years across 4 different health boards this has NEVER happened. In addition after many years of thinking the main treatment for it (cbt) didn’t work for me after disastrous experiences with therapists I recently learned that it was implemented incorrectly, which has done more harm than good.

I’m currently, despite being the most unwell I’ve ever been, housebound almost 2 years, barely leave my bedroom, eating 1 meal a day and sleeping 4 hours in a 24 hour period on average, getting NO support from mh services whatsoever.

I was dumped from the service in April, I have yet to receive an official explanation let alone an apology! My cpn at the time gave the impression it was because I was ‘failing’ to get better in a way they were happy with. At this point I had been literally BEGGING for my medications to be reviewed, for a referral to the psychology team and for a general review by someone more senior for over a year and had been getting stonewalled that whole time.

I’ve been left languishing on a medication that isn’t really helping but which is one which has serious withdrawal effects both physical and mental such that patients are very strongly advised not to consider even trying to withdraw without considerable support. On the rare occasions I even take it a little later than usual I do notice the awful effects. I’m also supposed to have blood tests 6 monthly as it can have detrimental effects on certain organs, in around 18 months I’ve only had 1.

I cannot even get anyone from the mh team to return my calls, they’re not even returning gps calls.

I’m in the process of organising a formal complaint but this is not straightforward either.

In some areas the nhs can be wonderful, I have friends and family who’ve had great care for cancer, certain injuries and certain chronic conditions. (Which is absolutely not to deny the shocking experiences of posters on thread in these areas)

But in others - mainly Gynae/obstetrics and mh it’s appallingly bad.

“The reason is the appointment has gone before they have even sent the letter out informing you.” Yes that’s something dd and I have experienced on several occasions! Apparently patients are meant to be fucking time travellers! Well we’re not, if the letter telling us about the appointment is sent - even TYPED AFTER the date of the appointment then shocker! The patient can’t attend the appointment!!

Under a USA system I’d be completely screwed because I’m unable to work, I’d probably not get insurance to cover what’s needed as “pre-existing conditions” and also because the USA system is notoriously bad for both the poor and the mentally ill.

But people like icecreamandcandyfloss would be fine with that as they seem to think poverty and mental illness are character flaws

that’s ridiculous them not properly investigating, diagnosing and treating the cause, there must be one! Surely also that would have been cheaper than prescribing all those meds and all the gp appointments

This is what I think but there is this policy of treating one symptom at a time.

When I was pregnant with dd1 I was walking down the hall way in my house and stretching and something popped and I couldn’t lift my legs other than to shuffle along.

I thought I had pulled a muscle.

I ended up having an excruciating pain in my right hip. So bad I couldn’t sleep .

I was diagnosed with needing a new hip but they didn’t give hips out till you were 60.

I saw a consultant 3-4 times per year who never once looked at me let alone examine me, I saw a physio every couple of weeks.
For 7 years.
I was shouted at for not doing the exercises because it wasn’t getting better. Like I wanted to spend my Childrens life shuffling around on a zimmerframe

They wouldn’t give me an MRI costing £300 because that was too expensive.

Eventually I saw my gp who said if I wanted to, I could go private but I was seeing one of the top back specialists and he was quite dismissive of who I was going to see

I spent £140 seeing an osteopath.

For the first time someone actually looked at me.
She took all my details then said that hip pain can be deferred pain from the back.

She took one look at my back and my bones were sticking out when they were not supposed to.

Turns out I had been walking around for 7 years with a slipped disc

I must have cost the NHS at least £100,000

I was referred to a psychiatrist in my teens because I would get terrible stomach ache after eating.
NHS diagnosis... anorexia
Final diagnosis after 3 years and weight dropping to 5.5 stone ...several stomach ulcers.

I was fortunately put on a study with some new medicines. Otherwise I would have died.

If dps or my experiences were just one offs then I wouldn’t have a problem with the NHS but we have had deaths and life limiting illnesses caused by NHS failures.
And if you try to sue, your notes suddenly disappear

You’d have to be really stupid to want to replicate the system in the USA.

There needs to be a better centralised system for GP surgeries (mine for example is excellent, rarely a wait longer than a few days for an appointment) and better money management - no laying £££ for bank staff, have proper salaried shift rotations and better protections, particularly for nurses. Mental health services need a huge overhaul.

My twin pregnancy with three admissions and an emergency surgery after birth would have bankrupted me in America.