HappySqurriel on 16 August 2009
| SamuelRSmith said: @HappySqurriel I'm not 100% on the Canadian system, but I've heard that there is no private system at all in Canada for health-care. In the UK we have the NHS, and we also have the ability for you to get private health insurance. Doctors/Dentists/Opticians/etc are allowed to work in both systems (the NHS covers every area of health, not just hospital care). So, if you go private, or if you go NHS, you will see the same people - the difference is that if you go private, you'll be able to see a specialist within the next day or so, and if you go NHS you'll have to wait a week or two. There's this misconception from the UK that as time goes on, the NHS has been getting worse. But the truth is quite the reverse. 15 years ago wait times would have been months for specialist care, it's now down to 1-2 weeks. You would have had to wait a couple of weeks before to see a GP (family doctor), now they will see you on the day. The system is by no-means perfect, as Kasz has pointed out on numerous occasions, people do get rejected health-care, but those people do have the right to go private if they are rejected by the NHS. The thing I hate, though, is when people say that social health-care leads to rationing. Yes, it's true, but all forms of health-care lead to rationing, it's just the private health-care rations according to wealth, whilst social heal-care rations according to priority (well, it should - individual systems may be broken, but that is the overall aim). |
Well, from the sound of it the NHS was designed a lot better than the Canadian system because (as I've argued for years for a two tier healthcare system) if someone is willing to pay for their own medical care the money (in the public system) that would have gone to their care can now be devoted towards other patients.
