The Potential Doom Of National Health Care

Today in America, we, the people, are part of a society that has become complacent in accepting everything and anything, whether we believe in what we are accepting or not. 

Nothing phases us any longer, even though in many instances history proves that the consequences of our actions today will have a direct negative affect on the majority of our lives tomorrow.  Which leads me to tackle the subject of the future implementation (to be passed into law by Congress at the end of July) of a nationalized healthcare system in the United States, one very much the same as the failed and infamous National Healthcare System in the United Kingdom.

Since when do Americans settle for a system that has been proven to be much less effective than the current system that is already in place?  My goal is not to imply that our country should settle for what we have in place today. But to actually downgrade and accept “change we can’t believe in” without a fight is something that is new to the American way of doing things. This “newly found” attitude of American society is not the one which inspired me so many years ago to make the trip here to start a new life with nothing but hope and dreams in my pockets. How can we lose everything that we have worked so hard for by simply staying silent?

Coming from a family that has traveled extensively and has had the opportunity to live in different parts of the world, I feel it is my duty as a devout American to share with the folks (who, by no fault of their own have not had the chance to see what I have seen) a glimpse about what my family and I experienced while living in England from 2002 to 2005.  If I told you that the British National Healthcare System (NHS) is flawed, I would be lying. The British NHS, just as most things run by a government bureaucracy, is way beyond being flawed at this point; it is simply broken, with no possibility of being fixed any time soon.
 

I can still remember, as if it were yesterday, our arrival in England and the shock we had almost immediately as my husband and I started sorting the medical situation as most families with children would do. Do we not live by the saying “first things first?” Well, that was us, prioritizing the long to-do-list one must take care of upon arrival in a foreign country with two young children and another one on the way.  As a typical mother, I immediately made my way around our new neighborhood inquiring about pediatricians, dentists and every other possible specialist a family may need at a moment’s notice. By the time I was done, I had come to the realization that long gone were the days my kids would have regular check-ups because, guess what, in England a pediatrician only practices at the hospital in cases of emergency care.

And that is if you are lucky enough to have your children hospitalized while a pediatrician is on call. My 5-month-old baby boy had to be hospitalized for three days during our time there due to a severe case of vomiting and diarrhea. Believe it or not, there were no pediatricians available to treat him until the very last hour of his stay in the hospital.

Then came the search for a dental practice — well, that is a whole other story. I am just going to say it is a good thing that our family has good dental hygiene, as we could not find on the entire island of the United Kingdom, a dental practice that would take us in. You ask why — simply because there are not enough dentists to meet to the current demand. Yes, it was right then and there that I started thanking my mother for making me brush my teeth multiple times a day, every single day, for in the next three years to come, if I wanted and/or needed to see a dentist, I would have had to make a trip back “over the pond” to do so. Humm, and people wonder why so many Brits have bad teeth?  

As we got settled in to our new life, we were assigned by the government bureaucracy to our General Practice (GP) physician (forget about having a choice of doctors); in other words the same primary care physician for every family member, child or adult. Within the first month I had the pleasure to pay a visit to our new clinic (known in England as “surgeries”) since I had just become pregnant with our third child. What followed during that visit has left me almost speechless to this day and I still have a hard time accepting the fact that our new found GP heard our baby’s heartbeat through the use of a funnel (similar to the kind you use to change your car oil) rather than a proper heart beat monitor. My husband, being your typical guy, doubted my story only to experience his own shock and awe during our next appointment, this time together, when the nurse handed me a plastic container that would serve as a urine holder for the remaining months of my pregnancy! Yes, there I was with a little plastic cup to be used and re-used throughout nine long months. Props to the NHS!

As if all of this had already not been enough to make one want to turn around and run back to our home country, during the next few months my 2-year-old son would start developing one ear infection after another. Time and time again, I would pack up the car and make the trip to the let’s just say, not so clean surgery, to have him checked out, only to have the GP tell me that ear infections were a common occurrence in children that age and they would “go away on their own.” Sure enough, they did go away on their own without the proper antibiotic use, but only because my son’s ear drums burst twice due to the approach taken by “big brother” not to spend money on antibiotics due to cutbacks in the NHS budget. Even after we offered to pay for the medication ourselves, we were told it was an unnecessary use of antibiotics.

Times were tough for our family under this unorthodox medical system and as my pregnancy progressed I started to hope for the best and fear the worst as I had no idea what to expect during the delivery of our baby. Nobody could have prepared me for what came next; the battle to have our baby boy circumcised shortly after his birth. The amount of time and the bureaucracy my husband and I encountered were beyond belief. The NHS told us that having a baby circumcised was not a practice they either encouraged nor supported.

We were on our own in search of a new avenue since the baby had to have the procedure done before he was 6 months old or we would have had to put him under general anesthesia once we were able to travel back to the United States. Since, by this time, we had become accustomed to resorting to our own creativity, we went searching for a Jewish Mohel who, for a lot of British Pounds, gladly and more than adequately performed the job. The actual delivery of the baby in the hospital went smoothly, although up to the very last possible minute the entire staff discouraged me from taking the epidural claiming it was not good for my, or the baby’s, health (another attempt on their part to cut costs down). Having experienced two previous deliveries, it would have taken God to convince me not to take the pain meds. I was in labor for quite a long time due to the fact that in England, the midwives are only permitted to check your cervix once every four hours!  Yes, that is correct.  So, even though I thought I was completely dilated after a couple of hours, I had to wait for the entire four hour period to pass. 

I concluded with this incident that the cost of latex gloves is also putting stress on the system! It is a miracle that my husband did not end up delivering our child himself. If this had not been sufficient, once the baby was born, they wrapped him in a blanket, handed him to me and left the room for over an hour due to a lack of staff. Nobody bothered to clean him; I was on my own sharing a room with a complete stranger who would not stop crying, but I was lucky since most women were sharing rooms with at least four other women. Let’s not forget, though, we were all there free of charge.  What a marvelous system.

A good English friend confided in me that she and her husband had a separate cash account where they were stashing money away on a monthly basis in case they ever developed a life threatening disease so that they could seek medical assistance in — none other than — the United States! Another English friend developed severe pains in her abdominal area only to find out that a cyst had been developing in her stomach. A cyst which did not undergo a biopsy for 10 months due to a long cue of other cases ahead of hers. 

The tales of the NHS are endless and I am happy to say that Americans will soon finally understand for themselves what “free” medical care really means. Long gone will be the days when we had the luxury of seeing a specialist at a moment’s notice, simply because these specialists will be fewer and will only accept private insurance cases (in other words, cash).  Women will now have to resort to the fact that annual exams will no longer be available due to the high costs associated with them. That’s right, no more yearly mammograms or even pap smears. I believe that these exams will now take place once every three years, just like under my beloved NHS system. 

The fun has just begun. This is what the likes of Hillary Clinton and Barak Obama want you and I to have. No longer will I have to tell the horror stories of what my family and I experienced under the British nationalized healthcare system. Americans will have their own stories to tell the world. 

“Yes, we can” and “hope and change!”

It is about time that Americans felt in their own bones how the miserable nationalized healthcare system from other countries works. It is the only way they will stop idealizing a government-run system that does not work. I am tired of Americans not paying attention to what is going on around them.  They need to experience for themselves what this absolutely atrocious system will do to their quality of life. Only then will they truly appreciate what they had. 

We will all receive equally bad healthcare, except of course for our political elite (the new Patrician class):  The Obamas and Congress, America’s modern day royalty; they will have their own special rules for everything. It is a classic case of socialism. Do what I say, not what I do!  Special rules the rest of us don’t get to play by.

from: thebulletin.us