If you can afford to pay for an NHS Treatment you should

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Or at least consider it. My friend was forever moaning about her MIL (hip) op being canx and saying it wasnt fair and complaining about the NHS. I know the MIL has 4 children all comfortably off - not rich by any means. It did make me think why don't you all club together and go private. If you've got the means then why not?

I would have no problem paying for private health insurance - but why should I? I already pay it through National Insurance contributions, if I pay for things like BUPA etc, then surely I should be exempted from NI as I am already paying for it.

The issue I have is those people who can work but who do not...they get their benefit payments, and then all healthcare free on top (i.e. Dental treatment) I get my wages, get taxed on them and then have to pay for things like dentists/eye care as well on top.

I think it's a slippery slope if we start means testing health care and judging whether certain things are self inflicted or not - where would it stop?

One thing blaming the fatties for self inflicted type II diabetes (you know it's not that simple right?), what about the idiot driver who wasn't paying attention and ploughed their car into a tree...do you wait it to ascertain if they're blameless enough for medical care?

Or the CF baby who was born even though their parents knew they were carriers? Who pays then?

The NHS has to remain free at the point of use, otherwise yiu might as well require everyone to have insurance...

Prompto - I take your point about carers and low paid. It is unfair.

The system at the moment is very unfair on a different set of people. Those that work full time on average wages so who pay, (and also usually then pay for housing and food and council tax - no discounts), and find that as the population increases and more and more conditions can be treated and people live longer etc etc , they never get to the front of the queue.

The problem is that if everyone uses the NHS then everyone is invested. Everyone wants it to be the best it can be and gets upset when govt. policy makes that less likely.

But if many people go private, then the wealthy (who tend to have most leverage in politics & policy etc) don't have to give a damn about NHS because they have alternatives.

This is why private schools can be damaging. If private schools were outlawed then state schools could improve a hell of a lot. Or dentistry: NHS dentistry is in shambles, but the affluent can shrug the problem off.

So not a good idea to widely encourage people away from using NHS.

Meanwhile the NHS was and still is paying to look after people who make themselves ill by way of obesity leading to type II diabetes Amazing that you know better than the geneticists who have been working on this for twenty years that all Type 2 diabetes is straightforwardly related related to obesity, or perhaps you have some way of telling which are 'self-inflicted' or perhaps you can't as there's a huge interaction between genes and environment, so that some people have impaired glucose control from the off/genetically more likely not to recognize hunger and so on.

We also know that what you eat and whether you exercise is related to risk of getting breast cancer, but we don't blame people for getting that, do we? Again, it's a complex interaction and isn't likely to be that straightforward for most people.

My mother recently faced a 6 week wait to have her ear syringed on the NHS. She is partially sighted and deaf in her other ear so she was really keen to be seen quickly so we arranged for private treatment. She was seen within a couple of days but in total the consultation and treatment cost £450! Lord only knows how much a hip replacement would cost!

BanjoStarz - you are of course right about punishing or charging for self-inflicted injuries.

My friend's cousin did exactly that - ran into a tree. Serious, life changing injuries. I know many smokers, drinkers, addicts, overeaters, sports players with tennis elbows and dodgy knees. We couldn't possibly make that call.

There must be a way though of encouraging responsibility for oneself.

user life on benefits isn't the cushy number you seem to think it is and the vast majority of claimants are entirely genuine and do want to work but have various barriers preventing then from doing so. Removing or restricting their right to health care would be cruel to say the least.

Bad knee, the idea of contributions based points system is intriguing and, managed well, could work. It's another way to ensure those who can work do.

I also think there's a lot of waste and a lot of treatments that shouldn't be funded or offered for payment only.

We need more money in the NHS, having a nominal fee for GP appointments would help raise funds. Stopping free prescriptions and dental work would help too. A persons NI costs will hardly ever cover the treatment they have over the course of their life I would imagine.

I am a staunch believer in the cradle to grave, universal NHS model. But until recently I had an insurance policy that worked as a "top up" to NHS provision, whereby if the wait for treatment, consultation or procedure was lengthy on the NHS we could access private healthcare. This meant that the MRI scan my DH needed for his back was done the next week rather than in three weeks (a huge difference considering he couldn't walk, but the doctors needed the scan to know how to proceed with his treatment).

BadKnee, really? People who work never get to the front of queue? My own experience of the NHS is that waiting lists are allocated based on need and urgency rather than how many hours someone works.

Let's be clear NHS is struggling with demand but is still one of the best health services in the world and one of lowest funded when considered as percentage of GDP.
Let's be clear 'going private' doesn't save NHS money it costs NHS money. It costs in staff training taking staff from NHS who then have to use expensive agency. It costs when something goes wrong and NHS picks up pieces. It costs in aftercare that isn't included. It costs in consultants using NHS time for private patients and taking NHS juniors to assist with surgery. It costs in loss of fund raising elective surgery being commissioned to independent sector.
Let's be clear chronic underfunding is the cause and it's coming to a school near you shortly.

there are massive issues with people who do go private - and then when that goes tits up due to complications, they have to use the NHS hospitals, often putting further strain on the service. Basically, the government is underfunding the NHS deliberately so they can say it's failing and privatise. It's already happening. I went for a scan at my doctors for a suspected hernia and the scan was carried out by a company hired in to do it... I didn't know until afterwards when I had to complain about how crap the service was (late by half an hour at 9:00am, couldn't find the hernia, rude etc) and the receptionist said it was an outside contractor. This is going on all over the NHS and it's shit. Private care is not better, nor is it ethical or practical.

A hip replacement costs around £15k privately, and that's just the op and stay in hospital. The post-care physio is going to run a few thousand more. Healthcare is EXPENSIVE. I wouldn't like to think of my child deciding they were going to potentially spend the value of a house deposit on an operation that would be free if I was willing to wait a few months, no matter the pain I was in.

If it was something like a short course of physio then yes going private makes sense, but for anything surgical, paying out of pocket is insane. You're much better off taking out private health insurance if wait times are a concern (which I have done).

cross post Crumbs1 but well said!

I paid to go privately for a minor operation (cyst removal) and it cost me, including consultations before and after, £5k. Can you imagine how much major surgery would cost? People who can afford to go private generally DO go private and those who can't go NHS. I would say that instead of worrying about how people with genuine complaints fund their surgery/treatment we should really be looking at how and why people who continuously damage their health through their own choices get treatment after treatment yet often don't pay taxes at all and do nothing to help themselves.

Economist friend is going spare lately ranting about how the NHS funding crisis is strongly liked to all the PFI intitiatives coming to maturity. Basically, the NHS is paying high rents & high interest charges because of how they planned capital expenditures decades ago. Some of the roots of the current crisis go back to bad planning decisions made in the 1980s-2000s.

I have BUPA coverage so I do already lessen the impact on the NHS and pay an awful lot of tax into it. If you ask some people to pay for their treatment on the NHS that will just increase the number of people going private (which does deliver a superior service) and as a pp stated being less invested in the continuation of the NHS.

However- when I was pregant I got given a form to entitle me to free perscriptions which I could not bring myself to use. BUPA already reimburses perscriptions (although obvs the more I contribute to claims the more the excess goes up for BUPA members as a whole which happened this year) and also I didn't really feel I could justify claiming for it when it is such a small and insignificant cost compared to what I and DH earn.

Am aware that the cost of working out who can afford to pay whilst pg would outweigh any savings made. But I do think when I'm next pg I won't claim either, I'm just in no way in need of a free perscription and was slightly baffled to be even offered it.

To be fair I dont know the costs involved

I stopped reading there. What a wally you are being op.

A hip operation is a big operation, not something I would be comfortable with a family member going privately for. Anything going wrong and the patient is whisked away with blue lights to a NHS hospital where there is ITU care and access to blood transfusion. Private hospitals look shiny on the outside, but they don't have the quality of back up care that NHS hospital provides.

bur Rainbow and others who blame people for needing the NHS, how about sports men and women, they injure themselves with their sports. will they escape the blame?

Prompto - sorry - I knew after I posted that that post was ridiculous - that wasn't what I meant. I linked two separate issues.

What I was trying to say was that if you have, for example, back pain. It is constant, it affects your mobility slightly but it won't kill you. The chances are because it is not urgent it will be along time before you are treated. (I waited two years for a pain clinic appointment by the way and still have to wait for a referral for possible treatment).

Also because if you are working full time it tends to be harder for you to take time off for appointments etc.

There is no advantage to working, paying your NI, paying for your painkillers and any prescriptions.

Meanwhile there will always be someone who has priority - quite right - if their need is greater - but what if there is always someone whose need is greater?? That is the problem with the priority/ need system.

No. On paper we earn a lot but have high outgoings and so couldn't afford it.

lljkk - bang on with the ppp repayments. They were criminal.

Private hospitals are businesses. Their aim is to make money.