FWIW, I just got a new "Preferred Formulary" list myself. Ya gotta work your way through lightweight drugs rather than use the really effective stuff, which unnecessarily extends a patient's suffering, in direct conflict to the Hippocratic Oath.
I was told by my insurance company that they were going to STOP paying for the expensive drug that worked for years and I had to start at the BOTTOM of the list (again) and work my way back up the tiers. We had already established that the bottom tier drug didn't work but I had to go back to it for 2 weeks. Two weeks of suffering there but the copay was cheaper so I actually might have saved some money myself had it worked but instead was forced to go up to the next tier in two weeks which cost me another copay but NOW it's the higher one. So now I'm not saving money at all (in the long run)Couple that to the fact that the good stuff only required me to take one $6 pill every 3 days or so. I could stretch what was supposed to be a months supply into 3+ months. Now I have to take the middle tier stuff almost every day meaning 3 times as many copays for me and 3 times the number of $5 pills the insurance company has to pay for. What savings have they gotten with this plan?
I have to write them a goddamn letter, that's the only recourse.
Then we could get into what happens to the elderly in THIS country. If you wind up in a nursing home they wipe out your family's fortune in short work and you spend whatever days you have left on welfare in substandard healthcare facilities. That's the reality of being elderly here. It's a shame both here and in Europe how the elderly are treated. And all over "the bottom line".
Take my aunt, in a home. Just barely aware of her surroundings. They "do her hair" every week for $40. Her jewelry was stolen, she insisted she take it there. Her TEETH have been stolen more than once, her glasses, hearing aid. All have disappeared over time and have had to be replaced.
If you get cancer, your treatment is prescribed by what the insurance companies will pay for. You CAN try other treatments but that comes out of YOUR pocket. If your pocket is not so deep, well too bad.
I refer to it more as the Hippocritic oath myself
I don't or can't see WHICH system has any advantages.
I might defend the NHS to some extent, but I'm not a 'socialised' medicine 'True Believer', I have just tried to defend it somewhat against purely doctrinaire assaults. That's not to say that there aren't aspects of a privatised system that I don't approve of, because there are. It seems to me that the inevitable reality in modern wealthy Western countries is that both will exist, and Britain may need to move to achieve a more extensive private sector.
I want to thank all of us for having taken the High Road in this discussion.
Riley Mc is right; there will always been administrative forces at work, whether they be .gov funded or the private beancounters. I guess in some ways, they keep us between the lines as we barrel down the highway.
I hope I haven't come across as doctrinarian about privately funded medicine; I think based on the way Iain explained the system in the U.K. (which I am admittedly ignorant of), it doesn't sound bad...IF you always have the option to pursue private care outside the nationalized health system.
I don't want to end up 90 years old and in need of drastic, complicated measures to prolong my waking hours by another six months; I think NO ONE wants that.
I ALSO don't think someone else's tax money should go to prolong my life for that six months, at a cost comparable to the entire lifetime's worth of health care that came previously.
I guess it's a slippery slope, and there ARE benefits on both sides.
But who decides?
Our technical ability to perform medical procedures has vastly outpaced our ability to deal with the morality and medical ethics of those same procedures.
Maybe a VERY basic nationalized health care AT MOST, with the option to buy the more exotic procedures, may be where we are headed in the U.S.