How funny would it be if the whole injury and fundraiser was actually a con?
Depends on your personal sense of humor, I guess. Different people are more or less prone to schadenfreude than others.
So⌠If this guy is the author of seventeen books, 14 videos and 5 DVDs. Why cant he just buy a airline ticket to London?
What a wonderful service the NHS is. I started to write that, as an expat who hasnât paid UK taxes for some time (I guess), Simon wonât qualify for free treatment. But I looked it up, and it turns out he will be covered if he returns to live in the UK:
As an expat myself, what good news this is. Although I hope I never need it. Good luck to Simon and his family.
It sounds like he canât just walk onto the plane. Flying with medical care isnât cheap.
Wait until the Toryscum party get wind of this. They will have a field day with it. The Dail Wail especially will be ecstatic / apoplectic with rage.
So⌠If this guy is the author of seventeen books, 14 videos and 5 DVDs. Why cant he just buy a airline ticket to London?
Well, as long as weâre being pretentiousâŚ
Sounds like you (and/or anyone close to you) has been fortunate enough to not be a United States citizen while having a financially devastating, prolonged medical illness.
Lucky you.
Medical Bills Are the Biggest Cause of US Bankruptcies
It can be financially and emotionally devastating here in the USA (when it doesnât kill you outright from the financial stress and lack of proper care people canât afford) because we still donât have a single payer system for health care. And, please keep in mind, medical insurance is often lost soon after the job is gone (employers tend to lay off and/or fire sick workers) and/or one canât afford premiums after co-pays and out-of-coverage, massive medical bills start marching in one after another. And, also, please educate yourself on the fact that wasteful emergent care doesnât cut it.
If you live in the USA and still donât get it, hereâs probably why you donât:
This is not a wonderful thing - if this guy wants to work in the UK and pay national insurance in the UK heâs welcome to use the NHS - but having someone advertising that he wants to âgameâ the system is only going to give weight to those who would like to remove public healthcare. This is a gift to the right wing.
Wait until the Toryscum party get wind of this. They will have a field day with it. The Dail Wail especially will be ecstatic / apoplectic with rage.
All this proves is that a single payer system for healthcare is superior to the draconian, privatized system in the USA.
I mean, damn this guy to hell for wanting basic health care so he can be a productive member of society instead of perpetually suffering and wasting away here in the USA. Iâm supporting the crowdfund and I hope he gets the treatment he needs. Meanwhile, you can sit on your pedestal and scoff at someone who is suffering and worry about some pseudo-political fallout.
That was my initial response too. The costs of health care in the US seems insane. It appears you must pray for a quick and painless end if you want to avoid crippling debts. I hope this bloke makes it back to the withered bosom of the Mother Country in time to make a recovery.
I donât think robcornelius was expressing any disapproval of Mr Lovell, but rather was noting how itâs a sad truth of the UK media that the Daily Fail and the Torygraph are almost bound to seize on this as evidence of More Furriners Stealing Our Healthcare.
Mind you, I can imagine the confusion this might cause for their writers. I mean, âLovellâ doesnât sound very foreign. And heâs white! Worst of all, he probably has a UK passport, and by virtue of birth rather than immigration. Whoever gets the task of writing a hatchet-job on this bloke must be desperately working through the right-wing press tick-box list of indignation points, trying to find one that applies.
I guess it will go something like this, âUS Con Man Rips Off Failing NHS FOR MILLIONS!!!â
Is it wrong that when I saw that the conman was from Essex I thought âwell that explains everythingâ?
I consider myself to be pretty liberal about most things (thatâs not to say I vote for the spineless LibDem party in this country!) but even I found myself annoyed by the idea of a guy whoâs lived and worked abroad for ten years deliberately coming back to the UK âto get free care on the NHSâ because heâs injured and the money and work has dried up.
I just donât get the objection to him going back to his own country to get what he is entitled to. He lived, worked and payed his taxes in the UK for some time, his whole family lives, works and pays their taxes, if he gets well again I am sure he will eventually live and work in the UK again so he is not getting anything for free.
Further, the system there is what the system is, the people agreed to it, the government agreed to it and now he is asking them to live up to their end of the bargain. You can be damn sure if he owed the UK government or a local municipality something they would expect him to hand it over and probably imprison him if he didnât.
By the way, the reverse does happen as well, US citizens who have lived abroad come home and make use of their medicare benefits because where they lived abroad had very poor or no health care system in place and I as a US tax payer am glad they do it if they need to.
National Insurance is something else - it doesnât pay for the NHS. And apparently heâs a UK subject, his family live and work in the UK so he is perfectly entitled to care on the NHS. But you are right about the propaganda value to Tories and privateers.
Exactly.
People need to keep in mind that as an author he would almost certainly have to carry his own insurance. Now, it is possible to get group rates from groups like the National Association of the Self-Employed (Iâve done it in the past), but the coverage is expensive and isnât too good.
As a relatively successful author (I assume, and I have one of his books), he is probably a lot better off then some of the self- or non-employed, and perhaps he had under-insured himself, perhaps because he couldnât afford it, perhaps for some other reason.
Even if he under-insured purposefully (and in retrospect, by mistake â remember, âhindsight isâŚâ and all), thatâs no reason for people to think he deserves physical and financial ruin. After all, itâs easy to be right and a hater by saying âyou made a mistake.â Itâs harder to be right and compassionate by saying âyep, you made a mistake; letâs see what we can do to rectify the situation.â
In addition to the fact that, as previously mentioned, he was an author (i.e. self-employed) who got sick in the U.S., which is enough to bankrupt anyone, the fact that he had a number of books published tells us absolutely nothing about his finances at any point. The average author does not even remotely make a living with their books, and the average non-fiction book sells something like 3000 copies.
All the time I hear about fundraisers to send kids from the UK to the US to get supposedly lifesaving treatment.
No-one hears the other side of the story: that if they had been in the US the kid;s basic treatment would have bankrupted the family already, and that this additional treatment is of marginal value at best (otherwise it probably would have been available on the NHS).
As a kid who had a complex and severe childhood illness that has lasted till my current middle-age, Iâm constantly grateful for the marvelous NHS. Free at the point of use and incredibly good value, especially for the difficult cases.
