Socialized Medicine and its Dangers

The following letter from Brian Cronin arrived in my email today. We should be very afraid of what appears to be coming.

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Rick Scott, CEO

Conservatives for Patients' Rights

700 12th Street, NW, Suite 700
Washington, DC 20005

Dear Mr. Scott,

            I have noted with interest your recent television spots highlighting the dangers of socialized medicine and featuring comments from doctors in the UK and Canada and highlighting stories from patients as well.

            I thought you might like to know the following story. 25 years ago, I came to the USA from the UK. I grew up under the National Health Service and have had personal experience of the way it works.

            Founded in 1948, it was a laudable concept and righted many wrongs but since its inception it has always been in debt. The system has been overworked and there have never been enough doctors, nurses or hospital facilities with up to date equipment. If it wasn’t for West Indian nurses, many hospitals would have ground to a halt.

            My father died in 1983. He went into hospital for what he thought was gall stones surgery, being somewhat jaundiced, and they discovered pancreatic cancer once they opened him up. He never recovered consciousness from the operation and died a day later. Preventative care was just not in the purview of many overworked general practitioners and he never had any tests or scans prior to going into hospital.

            In the late 1980s, my mother visited us when we were living in California from the UK. Feeling unwell, we had her go to our doctor at our cost to determine the cause of the distress. The doctor determined after a series of upper GI tests that she also, ironically, had gall stones which had to come out immediately.

            Not being covered in the US for such an operation, he told her that when she was back home in the UK, to get the operation without delay. That required going to her GP and getting a referral for a specialist.

            Prior to her visit and because of concerns we had for her healthcare, we purchased private health insurance for her from Private Patients Plan (PPP). An increasing number of people were using this insurance or BUPA, the British United Provident Association. The cost, in American terms, was minimal, roughly $1,500 a year. It did not accept any pre-existing conditions but it proved very beneficial.

            So, my mother went to the specialist and he confirmed the diagnosis and booked her in for the operation within two weeks because she had the insurance. Though she worried that it cost too much, it was a savior, and here’s why:

            She thanked the doctor and inquired: what if I didn’t have the private insurance and had to rely on the NHS? How long would she have had to wait for an operation? The answer was shocking – seven years! What, she asked, would happen if she had an attack, if a gall stone was trapped in the bile duct? She would have had to call 999 (their 911) and be transported to the ER of the local hospital to be worked on by a doctor she did not know.

            Now, the corollary to this story is that I myself experienced emergency care at Northampton General Hospital in February 1981 after a fatal car crash. My wife died in the crash but I survived and spent three weeks in the hospital after an emergency splenectomy and nursing a fracturing pelvis and facial lacerations. The care was wonderful, including the subsequent physical therapy and I paid not one penny for it.

            So while it is true that you will get immediate emergency care, it is the ongoing preventative care, the testing and the rationing of drugs and services, which you have recently highlighted, that is the issue. The cost of health care in the United States is astronomical and there has to be a way to ensure portability so that healthcare coverage is not dependant on employment or that employers opt out of providing healthcare coverage altogether because the government has a bigger stick. By the same token, some measure of personal responsibility is also a prerequisite. The happy medium is the holy grail.

            While I am not thrilled to have a body of doctors and/or bureaucrats playing God and deciding whether my life is worth living and denying me needed drugs as it currently the case in the UK, I can see there is merit in not having to fill out endless forms every time I go to see a new doctor. Making sure the privilege of centrally storing my medical information is not abused is the key. But I’ll believe that when I see it.

            So I am against socialized medicine as it is currently ‘enjoyed’ in the UK and very much hope that Mr. Obama’s announcement today that comprehensive healthcare reform be enacted by July 31^st is realistic and does not end up having a central payer system edging out competitive pricing by other healthcare insurance providers.

            If the above stories about my parents aid you in your efforts, please feel free to use them with my blessing. I look forward to your response in due course and the success of your continued good efforts.

                                               
Sincerely,

   
Brian  Cronin