[Angus]

Originally Posted by Niall

Okay fair play to you and what happened with your bother, I'm deeply sorry to hear that, but how you can sit there and claim that the American way of running things would be better baffles me absolutely.

I just don't understand. Have you not seen the obscene amount of money the average American is forced to fork out just for drugs? Operations are a whole other story. I read about a family once who had to sell their house just to get father treatment he needed. No-one should ever be forced to consider things like that. Healthcare should be something offered to everyone unconditionally..

And then there's the other matter of the health system being run as a business. The patients become customers and profit takes precedence over the quality of service provided to the patients. There are countless stories about American HMO's denying their customers service simply because the company is too stingy to fork over the money for an operation/medication/treatment which the person is actually covered for.

All in all the NHS, despite it's flaws is actually a healthcare system that is far superior to that in the US and to adopt their way of doing things would be to make a seriously large step backwards in how we run things.

The NHS is chock a block with bureaucratic management, earning megabucks salaries and running it as if it were a business. This is ALREADY happening in this country. Instead of a blanket national insurance contribution which disappears down the bottomless pit of the NHS, we should have the choice to make contributions to other forms of healthcare insurance. Bully for you if you think the NHS "works". In my experience it does not.

For it to work effectively the bureacracy at the top needs to be pruned right back, budgetting across all regions should be consistent, so that a patient can be confident they will receive the same level of care wherever they live, and there should be far more transparency when it comes to decisions made that are literally life and death. I had to fight tooth and nail to get my brother's GP and hospital records, and now I have them I understand why they were so reluctant to make them available. The mistakes made were shocking, and the lack of concern, and lack of urgency they showed was criminal. Needless to say a court case is on the cards. It won't bring my brother back, but those responsible for failing him will pay for it and hopefully they won't be allowed anywhere near other sick folk who, like, my poor brother, trusted the NHS to give him prompt and appropriate treatment.

The NHS is dying on its feet, it is a lumbering bureaucratic machine that has lost touch with its purpose. IMO just because it sometimes works for some folk, does not make it reliable or effective. I dread ever being diagnosed with anything life threatening, because it really is a lottery as to whether I would survive.