I have long had concerns about bringing government into the medical system here in the U.S. We have all heard the horror stories about long waits, the inability to choose your doctors and terrible mismanagement. I wanted to give you a real-life case that just happened to a friend of mine in a country that has socialized medicine. Make no mistake, the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare), is the first step into a an entirely government controlled healthcare system.
Since I haven't asked her permission to post this, I am going to leave her name out of it.
Sorry if anyone has been trying to get hold of me. I've been experiencing just how bad a state our National Health Service is in. I knew it was bad but it's actually 10 times worse & more chaotic than I thought.
To start with all I wanted was some decent pain killers. The GP & surgeon he sent me to thought, I should be an emergency admission to hospital. The hospital agreed but after hours stuck in the corridor waiting for a bed they admitted they didn't have one. On a plus note they gave me the pain killers I was asking for in the first place - result! My trolley was "parked" in the A&E entrance - patients were coming in by air & road ambulance with no one to treat them! One poor man in the corridor had his drip taken out and told he had to make his own way home as not sick enough! Absolutely shocking.
Even though I knew there were problems I was shocked at how chaotic it was. I didn't want to stay in anyway but having been told I had to be admitted and being left on a trolley in the corridor for 9 hours then umm sorry we can't find a bed is crazy (they did however waste their time coming out to the entrance every 2 hours to take my blood pressure etc.) especially when if the GP had just given me the pain killers I wanted when I wanted them I wouldn't have even been there in the first place. They got annoyed when I changed out of the gown and put my own clothes back on. It wasn't exactly warm out there! And the amount of time ambulance crew had to wait to log into 1 computer they all shared every time they brought a patient in and then again when they left was ridiculous.
The above came from a series of posts on my Facebook page. Just dropping the current people out of the AFC and eliminating it seems cruel, but moving toward a system such as my friend is living with sounds like a death sentence.
Unfortunately, Congress refuses to act. I would like to see the government get OUT of healthcare entirely. Laws requiring insurance companies to allow pre-existing conditions and somehow allowing the poorest segment of our population to get care (isn’t that what Medicaid is for?) seem like common sense.
Just another example of what Robert Heinlein would have called committee syndrome. He once asked, “Do you know what a camel is? A horse designed by committee.”
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