have just been charged £20.50 for a doctors signature!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[changednametoprotecttheinnocen]

I have just asked my gp for a referal for my private insurance and was charged £20.50 for her signature..am I the only one who thinks this is disgusting!!! I thought it would be a good thing not to drain the NHS!!V cross..can you tell????

I have only been asked once, and that was by a mate.....to be fair she also signed my kids forms as she is also a teacher.

Thinks.....I must be very scary and put people off asking me

Go bundle and alsochangedmyname. Quite reasonable for a GP to charge for time spent on not treating waiting room prole losers with the kind of poor lifestyle that makes them ill.

theres an note up in our Drs saying that GPs will not sign passports - they are obviously missing out on a lucrative financial opportunity

btw, it doesn't just involve signing wrt passports. the dr friend who signed my dd's received a detailed letter from the passport office much later checking that he really knew her!

(normsnockers, it's from 11.30 til 6.30, ds goes to school til 3.15)

i work with professors, luckily, so no bother getting passport signed off on.

but changedname would HAVE to use a GP for this as it was for insurance, not a passport.

i had to get the gp to fill in a form for my travel insurance when they said i couldn't fly - cost me £13, it took time out of her day to do and i thought that that was reasonable.

Go bundle :) Completely agree, there's nothing very shocking about this.

Bundle, shouldn't you be getting your dh to post on here and not be worrying your pretty little head about it?

Ahem, if you can afford private health care or have a job that comes with private health care can't you afford £20 then? It doesn't seem much to me. I don't really buy the 'taking the strain off the NHS' argument, never have done. But hey, that's another thread!

batters, you timewaster you, with your real illnesses..pah!

It has just taken me over a fortnight to contact my preferred GP at our practice to get some follow-up appointments in place from test results. It is so obvious from his wardrobe of battered fleeces and the flashy motor in front of the surgery that he has been prioritising signing pieces of paper instead of finding time to treat idiots like me who have brought their troubles on themselves by irresponsibly giving birth to children.

I still think it was pretty feckless of you to reproduce at all you NHS time-waster!

So, what if changednametoprotecttheinnocen had been at the GP for a referral to an NHS osteopath. Now is her cause a medical one? And worthy of the GP's time? It's going to cost thePCT more now, isn't it?

And WWW
"Ahem, if you can afford private health care or have a job that comes with private health care can't you afford £20 then? "

Ahem... that statement is absolutely false. Having a job that provides private medical insurance does not equate to being wealthy.

And, do you really think that the people who support the NHS are the very ones who are not entitled to it's care.

By the way, my nice GP does not charge for private referrals. It would irritate me (though not hugely) if she did.

I guess what irritates me about this story is that you have to go to your GP to get this letter. It's always a condition for private medical to cover the consultant charges. So, perhaps if insurance companies quite requiring this, private patients wouldn't have to bother their GPs.

Oh, I can't believe I did that. It's my pet peeve, Bundle. GPs. It's plural, not posessive. ^^

For the OP - perfectly reasonable and not at all disgusting, unlike your assertions re: crap lifestyles, loaded GPs and hypochondriacs.

Wait, I'm confused now, Bundle. Just reread my post and that is posessive that I was referring to (GP's time). Where's my dodgy apostrophe?

In it's.

"but if you are ill they don't charge for their signature on a prescription. " No, because the NHS subsidises them for giving medical treatment to sick people. Not for undertaking admin. in fact, evberyonme moans about admin costs of the NHS - well, this is one of them! It does take time for the clerical staff to find records, re-file them, keep a note of what has been done.

And the upshot is that although you may well be signing up for private healthcare, the NHS is still there for you, your children etc, and will be once you are old etc etc. And if you need major surgery, your consultant will jab=ve been trained in the NHS.

Yay to my brilliant gp, who has written supporting leters for my child's needs in school, is always there when I need her, AND arranged an immediate osteopath appt for DP within their practice based Osteo clinic because he had a v bad back in the week of my due date, and we had planned an active homebirth! He wasn't even registered there, but she could see that I needed him!!

"Ahem... that statement is absolutely false. Having a job that provides private medical insurance does not equate to being wealthy.

And, do you really think that the people who support the NHS are the very ones who are not entitled to it's care. "

The NHS will be there when you retire and the work-provided Bupa runs out, and EVERYONE is ENTITLED to NHS care.

The purpose of the welfare state is to provide for society as a whole, not to pick off individuals.

MI? It's = it is.