NHS Recommends Amputation Instead of Treatment for Girl’s Leg
Are you really sure you want to start trading horror stories of patients who got screwed over by the UK’s NHS versus patients who got screwed over by private insurance companies in the U.S.?
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I’ve been thinking of an analogy about this for quite some time now.
I came to the conclusion that wealth/asset hoarders are like dragons. They reach the point where they are just gathering to gather, oblivious to whatever harm it’s doing to the world around them. As long as they have their pile, nothing else matters.
Does Bezos need 165 billion dollars (last I heard)? Nope. Except he’s living the dream as king of hoard mountain. For now.
We need dragonslayers.
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Or she cared more about running a hot dog stand. Some people do things out of passion, you know. Me, I am a programmer because I like solving puzzles, not because I think software engineering is a way to get rich.
Editing to add my own view on capitalism:
To me, it seems the problem with capitalism is that it has no maximum score. There’s no way to say “congratulations, you win the game” and then retire the winner to a nice, comfy life. Or let them compete some other way, as long as they realise that they can’t rack up a high score. Because it isn’t materialism any more, it’s too abstract with the amounts they are scrabbling at. It’s only about seeing who can get high score, not about actual material comfort.
And that’s the conundrum: advancement of society needs an incentive, and man, was money ever an incentive for a long time. It was a nice way to encourage people to compete, wasn’t it? But it was never perfect, and now its flaws are too large to ignore.
Sigh.
I hope the AI’s come in the end. Preferably something like Iain Banks’ Culture, but now I would also welcome Colossus from The Forbin Project.
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In a way, you are correct in a historical sense. Think of how the robber barons came to be: by exploiting new technologies such as railroads, or steel, or oil. Technology is unevenly distributed, and those able to position themselves at the bottleneck can get extremely rich. What is missing from the equation is a way to more evenly distribute technology. Or rather, the tools designed to break up those bottlenecks, to slay monopolies have all been dismantled.
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Two wrongs don’t make one right or someone right. It is to show that the best solution could be the availability of private and public medicine, where the patient makes the choice of treatment. You could have the option a tooth extracted or the carie treated.
Finland has an interesting hybrid system.
I just wanted to quantify reaction.
Absolutely. Jose framed her decision in particular as being about the money, though.
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That’s exactly what they have in the UK. No one is forced to use NHS if they have enough money to pay for a private doctor.
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Oz as well.
Socialised medicine here has always been (a) voluntary, and (b) wildly popular.
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Buncha free-loading kangaroos!
/s
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In Finland it is far better, you do not need to have all the money to go to a private doctor.
Let me quote from their site: “You can choose a place of treatment in private healthcare, in which case the Social Insurance Institution – Kela will reimburse a percentage of your treatment costs.”
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and i don’t like that headline because someone i know lost a parent on that flight, and seeing a headline like that can be hugely triggering. sometimes we forget these events effected real people who walk among us
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I’ll own that. The idea that universal healthcare is a magical dust that means no painful and heartbreaking decisions is wrong. I support universal healthcare because it is the single best way of increasing universal access to medical care regardless of income. And that is such a huge win, that it’s worth a other’s lives.
But pretending that it costs no lives? That is cowardice, and I will not countenance having those who do shoulder the price for a huge social good be ignored or diminished.
The privilege of universal healthcare for someone happily middle class (I’ve got a larger than median household income) like me is not that I have better healthcare than I would under an American style system - it’s that what I pay for medical care through my taxes covers (as best as I can work out), another fellow Canadian. I am given the opportunity to contribute to society in a way that I simply would not if I was left to my own rather greedy devices.
And that is an opportunity that not only does good, but also binds fellow Canadians together (at least most of them :-))
However, the price of providing universal access is that treatments that are too expensive for the benefit they provide are simply unavailable (short of traveling to a foreign country). I accept that. But should I pretend that there are none who are worse off? No. That’s way worse than acknowledging that yes, there are costs to the massive benefits of universal healthcare.
jose, I don’t know where you stand on the spectrum of beliefs in medical systems - but if you are unwilling or unable to acknowledge the costs of your preferred system along with their benefits, then you are unworthy of the beliefs you claim to hold.
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Did anyone here claim it’s an infallible panacea?
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I’d claim that jose’s illustration of a painful decision was an indication that he believed that we thought so. I thought it worth disabusing him of this fact.
By the way, thank you for your response to my question upstream. Very well put.
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A hybrid system, like the already-mentioned parallel system in the UK, ameliorates this particular issue quite well - at least for those who can afford private care.
I’m thinking of the vast wealth that was
created for land owners
by slaves.
Which was then inherited by and increased
for generations.
…
Buffett said it’s not about the money, but for the challenge of the Game.
Oprah (of whom I’m not a fan) said that
what money does best
is give choices and options.
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