Long Delays for Surgery Under Britain's Socialized Medicine
Posted by Van Helsing at April 7, 2011 10:29 AM
Bankruptcy isn't the only thing that awaits us if ObamaCare isn't repealed. Here's another look at our dystopian future from the moribund canary in the coalmine of collectivist moonbattery, formerly great Britain:
Surgeons say patients in some parts of England have spent months waiting in pain because of delayed operations or new restrictions on who qualifies for treatment.
In several areas routine surgery was put on hold for months, while in many others new thresholds for hip and knee replacements have been introduced.
Although hip and knee replacements are expensive, they are usually well worth it because of their effectiveness. According to Peter Kay of the British Orthopaedic Association, they actually save society money overall, presumably by curing the patients of their disability. He describes the government-imposed delays for these operations as "devastating and cruel," and offers this surprising (to bureaucrats) insight:
He says that simply delaying surgery by one means or another does not improve the outcome for patients as their condition can deteriorate.
"The double jeopardy is that patients wait longer in pain, and when they have the operation, the result might not have been as good as it otherwise would have been had they had it early. "
But people who would bury their countries in debt that it will take generations to repay aren't capable of grasping concepts like long-term benefit. They just want the numbers to come closer to adding up for the current budget.
A number of PCTs [primary care trusts] have been explicit about their decisions to put all routine operations on hold for several months up to April to help balance their budgets by the end of the financial year.
The bureaucrats aren't complete idiots. They just have different objectives. Healing patients is for doctors to worry about. The State only cares about statistics.
Putting routine operations on hold means that GPs [general practitioners] simply stop referring their patients for surgery. So although a patient might be waiting longer, this isn't recorded in the official waiting statistics.
Another way of adding invisible waiting time into the system is to implement stricter new criteria which have the effect of delaying the point when a patient can be referred for treatment. … They include introducing scoring systems for patients for pain or disability, or not allowing some obese patients to be referred for surgery until they have been on a weight loss programme.
Sure we'll give you the free healthcare you've paid through the nose for through taxes all your life. But first you have to live on lentils until you've dropped fifty pounds; then you'll get your urgently needed surgery.
Now for the punch line:
The coalition government has stopped performance managing the 18 week waiting time, although it remains a legal right under the NHS [National Health Service] constitution.
There are few constructive activities that can be performed more efficiently through government coercion than through economic freedom. Healthcare obviously isn't one of them.
