| Mr Khan said: @ Samuel: yes. You can't go around saying what America should and shouldn't be doing when you have all your medical needs met by a system that actually cares about people and not profits. |
a) I can say what I want, about where I want. I'm sure you have opinions on things going on outside your country.
b) You think the NHS cares about patients? Ha. The NHS is full of the same incentive-driven humans that health insurance companies are. The people at the top of the NHS only care about lining their pockets, and increasing their power.
The NHS is a terrible system where the service you receive is dependant on where you live... and guess which kinds of areas get the funding to provide the best treatments? And the fact of the matter is, they had to introduce this "post-code lottery" system because providing all treatment to everybody was unsustainable.
Meanwhile, my parents, right now, are up in London visiting a friend who's laying on a hospital bed waiting for pancreas cancer treatment. Not only did it take over a month to diagnose, when he finally was admitted to hospital, he was admitted to a hospital that didn't have the equipment to treat his cancer. He had to wait for 3 weeks in this hospital before a bed became available in another hospital that could treat the cancer (the other hospital is over an hour away).
I know it's just an anecdote, and anecdotes don't mean much by themselves... but this isn't a rare thing, and it's not the only problem with the NHS. There was a headline in the Telegraph the other day that stated 1 in 5 diagnoses were incorrect and the treatments potentially leathful.
And none of this even takes into account the costs. If you look at the history of National Insurance (the "paying into" part of the single payer system), it has crept up from 6.5% to 12% of income (up to an "upper limit" - however, a new rate of 2% has been added to above the upper limit). And that's just the employee rate, you also have the employer contributions. The rising costs of the NHS have exceeded the growth of the economy for over a decade, despite some reforms and attempts at reigning in the costs.
Simply put, the NHS model arguably does not work today, and it certainly won't work in the future.
