A friend's husband has always worked for the government and has health insurance (really!!!). That was what she said and she needed a major treatment after being diagnosed with breast cancer privately.
But:
"If you have treatment with NHS, we will pay you a thousand pounds but you can opt to have the treatment privately, mainly the surgery that will cost us twenty thousand pounds but you are STILL BETTER OFF TO HAVE CHEMOTHERAPY WITH ONE OF THE TOP LONDON HOSPITALS.
Wow!! Well the consultant also works for the NHS! sO, HIS hOSPITAL!!!
She preferred the Monopoly Game and collected the money! she is fine with the NHS treatment.
Mathematics:
Teenagers 'failing to study maths to a good standard'
Looks like it is not just teenagers:
The NHS is running out of money, so we must give most of it to privateers to save money!!!
Andrew Lansley/ HSCB
If the private providers are making money and the GP commissioning teams have a limited pot and that Consultants working for the likes of BMI hospitals have a 300% increase in pay compared to old NHS Hospital pay scale, either tax payers are going to be forking out more and more money or someone is not going to get their treatment.
But the sums are somehow wrong!
Government money is the best money for anyone to make and that is really tax payer’s money. The new NHS will be the private sector’s main source of income, as only 90,000 in the UK are covered by private insurance and often they are offered cash incentives to use the NHS.
It is therefore essential for the private health care companies that the NHS is around, at least in name, so that they can make money by providing a “better value and more competitive” service to the NHS!
Some parts of the NHS will have to remain too, as it is necessary for the private sector to dump the un-profitable patients: the chronic and the long term mentally ill, for example. (Right now, 25% of NHS psychiatric patients are treated by the private sector. But why? Even in psychiatry, there are cherries to be picked.)
Finally, in order to keep the mortality figures low at competing private hospitals, they need to be able to rush some of their patients off to NHS hospitals at the critical moments!
- Ends discrimination against people with pre-existing conditions.
- Limits premium spread to normal, high risk and healthy risk to say under 20% either way of normal.
- Limits premium discrimination based on gender and age.
- Prevents insurance companies from dropping coverage when people are sick and need it most.
- Caps out-of-pocket expenses so people don’t go broke when they get sick.
- Eliminates extra charges for preventive care.
- Contribute to an ABTA style cover in case Insurers go broke. They will
Our NHS is not without faults and often the faults were to do with government. Impossible targets set up by successive governments have one aim: limit access to health care.
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We could legislate that Insurers will have to pay for any NHS treatment for those covered by them. It will stop Insurers “gaming” NHS hospitals. This will prevent them saving on costly dialysis and Intensive Care. Legislate for full disclosure of Insured status.
Insurers cannot drop coverage or treatment after a set period and even if they do they will still be charged if the patient is transferred to an NHS Hospital.
This will eliminate problems like PIP breast implants.
It will indeed encourage those that could afford it to buy insurance and in any case most firms offer insurance for their employees including the GMC.
To prevent gaming of Insurers by individual patients (I look after their interest too), the medical fee should be paid up front by the patient and then deduction taken from premiums. Corporate clients like those with the GMC should not be gaming Insurers.
Imagine the situation where those with “individual personalised budget” being able to “buy” their own insurance!
In fact, to save money, government can buy insurance for the mental patients and the chronically ill.
This way their will be real choice and insurers will be competing with each other to provide the worst deal.
Why?
What Health Insurer will want the business?
Perhaps they will go back to the US and we will have our own NHS back.
“……The principle of care for all from cradle to grave is worthy and wonderful. But the current reality is a cradle rocked by accountants who are incapable of even counting the number of times that they have rocked it……..” These are the very same people we pay market rate or they will go elsewhere!!!
9 comments:
My name is Sarah Longlands, the wife of Dr Wheldon, mentioned above. I found your blog by accident when looking up "David Wheldon" on Google, something I do from time to time to see who is linking to both our web sites.
I thought I would give you a small update:nearly three years on again since the publication of "Ignoring the Evidence" I am still going strong, not having had an adverse MS event since starting treatment in August 2003. When I started I couldn't even hold a paintbrush but now I have worked through watercolours to acrylics and have now moved back to my favourite medium of oil paints and of no mean size. My progressive multiple sclerosis was so aggressive, I really shouldn't be here now, but I am.
I have not seen my neurologist since being given the diagnosis. David has, since they work in the same hospital, but although at one point the man showed some interest, this soon passed and the man has never looked at my subsequent improved scans. In fact, he once ran out of the radiologists room exclaiming "I can't look at this!" He is obviously very good at saying "Never."
There are always going to be people willing to put my recovery down to "spontaneous recovery" but I think it very odd that this should have happened within a few hours of downing my first ever doxycycline, after having my first multiple sclerosis relapse twenty years previously, age 24. Then and for many years it was untroubling, with few, easily resolved relapses. Over the years I had been able to forget about it, so I readily accepted the diagnosis of the orthopaedic surgeon. I have since discovered that David married me thinking I might well have MS, because of my clumsiness although by that time I has already decided that it couldn't possibly be the case.
Since starting to recover, David has seen many patients abandoned by the neurological establishment and has written two papers with Charles Stratton of Vanderbilt University about chlamydia pneumoniae and multiple sclerosis. I started writing on http://www.thisisms.com, where a psychologist named Jim Kepner, a sufferer of another disease caused by chlamydia pneumoniae, saw me and started to treat himself. Two and a half years ago this led to him starting a wonderful site: http://www.cpnhelp.org where people from all over the world suffering from any of the many diseases in which CPn is implicated can come together for freely given help and reassurance.
Very best wishes,
Sarah Longlands. 12th April, 2008
Dr Am Ang Zhang
"Hello again Dr Zhang! I hope you enjoyed your hols, but it was only a tiny flurry really, like the small snowfall we had the other Sunday morning which was gone before most people knew it had been there.
I totally agree with you about the state controls, first set in place in our country when the fat man in hush puppies was health minister, I had only recently both got my MA and acquired MSi and chlamydia pneumoniae was not even realised to be a serious pathogen. I'm glad we have original thinkers over at Vanderbilt and I am so glad I am married to one here, who discovered what they were doing and thought that it was better to get on with treating me rather than waiting for endless double blind trials that would never happen, antibioticsi not being profitable things.......Sarah
An Itinerary in Light and Shadow by a real "Painter of Light"...........Completed Stratton/Wheldon regime for aggressive secondary progressive MS in June 2007, after four years, three of which intermittent. Still slowly improving and no exacerbation since starting. EDSS was 7, now 2, less on a good day."
but wow, they now have something they can make money on! a drug for Fibromyalgia pain (packed with a plethora of side effects)!
I thank my lucky stars that one friend pointed me straight to David Wheldon's site and having met with him, I'm about to start on the protocol. With the help of the pioneering stalwarts on the CPn Help forum mentioned above, David Wheldon, and the inspirational Sarah, I fully intend to see this through. If it's possible to cure it then I'll have a darn good try.
My GP and Neurologist have refused to have anything to do with the Protocol which I find exceedingly strange. I always thought the medical profession were tasked with making patients well by whatever means, it seems however that unless the drug companies are waving some new miracle drug at them, they're not open to looking at old medication used in a new way.
Having read your blog though, I'm going to spend the afternoon scouring the house in case I have a recalcitrant Iguana hiding in a dark corner. Or maybe I'll round up the frogs in the pond and force them to take a Chlamydia Pneumoniae test. :-)
The Cockroach Catcher