Health Care – Another Perspective

I’ve posted below snippets from an editorial which appeared in today’s St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

A St. Louisan’s view of the British National Health Service
BY Reva Klein
Tuesday, Sep. 01 2009
LONDON

• “I’ve lived here since 1973, and whenever I visit my hometown of St. Louis, or anywhere else in the United States for that matter, I’m invariably regaled with friends’ and relatives’ horror stories about medical bills.”
• “I know the realities of the British National Health Service pretty well. As a journalist, I’ve written about it. As a mother of two children (born at home with National Health Service midwives and doctors) and now as a baby boomer with the usual sprinkling of medical dramas, I’ve been a regular user of the service. I pay a monthly National Insurance contribution of the equivalent of $15.82 as a self-employed person. This has seen me through three operations, one of them life saving, a two-week hospital stay, half a dozen or so investigations, probably a good few hundred visits to the doctor for my children and me and highly subsidized drug prescriptions.”
• “A system that gives every citizen the right to health care free at the point of entry wis [sic], I believe, the hallmark of a truly democratic society, one in which no one is penalized because of his economic status. And democracy in this sense doesn’t mean bargain-basement care, either, thank goodness. In today’s NHS, we do have choice of where to see specialists, and we can get a second opinion if we don’t like the first.”
• “Sure, there are aspects of the health service that we all take great pleasure in complaining about. Emergency rooms can be crowded and the waits epic. NHS hospitals have had serious outbreaks of MRSA and C. difficile, and some hospital wards seem — and indeed are — unequivocally Victorian. These things need changing and both Labour and the Conservatives (the political parties in Britain) have vowed their commitment to better resourcing, modernization, the works.”
• “By the way, the 92-year-old mother of a friend now in a London hospital following a stroke, who is getting daily physiotherapy and care and attention from a specialist stroke unit that in the United States would cost the bare minimum of $500 a day, has yet to catch sight of a single death panel.”
• “Reva Klein is London-based journalist and a St. Louis native.”

You should really take a minute to read the editorial in its entirety. I hate when the truth gets in the way of the debate. Ha.