| Spanky |
12-19-2006 05:59 PM |
And it's all free!!!!
Quote:
Originally posted by Replaced_Texan
I was also a poor student in the UK under NHS. I got great, great care on three occasions. Never a line, never a wait, and the scar over my right eyebrow from an unfortunate rugby accident are practically invisible. You would have thought the guy who put the stitches in (after a two minute wait in the office instead of a four hour wait in an ER, I literally walked into the office about ten minutes after the accident covered in blood and dripping) was a plastic surgeon rather than a GP.
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Quote:
Originally posted by Sidd Finch
I was in France earlier this year. While in Paris, my daughter got very sick (as in, stopped breathing for a few seconds). We called the equivalent of 911. Her breathing came back while we were calling, but it was raspy. Since it wasn't an emergency situation any longer, the operator said they wouldn't send an ambulance. Instead, they would send a doctor to our apartment.
Within 30 minutes, we had a doctor checking her, giving us prescriptions, and running a variety of tests. He also gave us some instructions to run tests ourselves (collect urine, dip an indicator strip of some sort in, bring a sample to a lab).
Since we are not French citizens, we of course had to pay -- 50 Euros. The meds -- three separate prescriptions (antibiotics, an emergency thing to thin the mucus if she had trouble breathing again, and something else that I forget) cost another 20 Euros.
A week or so later, we were in Avignon and I had the same bug my daughter had had. It wasn't as severe, just very annoying, and I wanted some meds to treat it. We tried to find a clinic, but it was late and none were open nearby. So we called the sub-emergency line, and they sent a doctor out. Once again, we had to pay 50 Euros.
In contrast, my wife recently tore several ligaments in her ankle. She called our doctor; they referred her to the Emergency Room. Since she had our daughter with her, she got treatment priority -- she only had to wait about half an hour. Despite having excellent (and expensive) health insurance, we had to pay a $100 co-payment.
After two weeks, her ankle was still very swollen and painful. She could not get an appointment with our primary care physician. She had to call back for several days in order to get a referral to a specialist. Unfortunately, the referral was to a shoulder specialist, but he kindly set her up with someone for her ankle -- who saw her a week or so later. This cost another hundred bucks, I think.
In sum, let me say that I don't know what the "best" system is -- I hesitate to draw too many conclusions from my own anecdotal experiences. But I question whether our system is really the best in the western world. I think that we do some things very, very well -- especially those things that deal with catastrophic problems, severe injuries, etc. I think that the low-level, general health maintenance stuff we tend to do very poorly, largely because insurance carriers know that regular visits to doctors, while beneficial to patients, can be detrimental to their bottom line.
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Sometimes I feel like I live on two different planets than some of the people on this board. I have never heard stories or had experiences with the NHS or the French health care system even close to what you guys went through.
It’s like you guys are telling me you went to McDonalds and got served a Filet Mignon and Cognac.
When I lived in London as a student I tried to get an appointment once with the NHS and the earliest I could get one was in eight months. I took a friend of mine who was injured in a soccer game (I guess just like RT) to the emergency room at seven at night and he got help at one thirty the next afternoon. That is right: one thirty the next afternoon. That was in the early nineties. He had a broken leg, but they were at least nice enough to give him some mild pain killers while he waited. In 2000 when I went to the South Surrey Medical center, I waited for seven hours to see a doctor. The doctor was from Nigeria and his English was so bad he needed a nurse to translate (yes – that is correct; this was a hospital in England).
I was connecting flights in London on British Airways and had become sick on the flight to London. In order to postpone the next leg of the flight from London to Nairobi, without having to pay the extra two thousand dollars, I had to get a note from a doctor saying I shouldn’t fly. So I went to the South Surrey Medical Center. I had an eight hour layover, but I almost didn’t get the note in time because of the wait. If I hadn’t had to get the note before the connecting flight I might have had to wait many more hours, and I was so sick I couldn’t even sit up.
When I was a student in London everyone used to sit around and try and top other students with their terrible NHS stories. When I worked in Tokyo, there were three English lawyers in my firm who always used to make jokes about the NHS and talk about how bad it was. Until RT's story, I don’t think I have ever heard anyone praise the NHS. Has anyone else on this board had an experience with the NHS? Have I slipped into the twilight zone?
I interned for a law firm in Paris. I was constantly told to avoid the government health program by everyone in the firm. I didn’t take people’s advice (because I didn’t want to spend the money) and visited the public hospital near the Hotel De Ville and that place was god awful. I sat in a smoked filled room for hours and never even got to see a doctor, just a nurse. I was on a student visa, and did not have a work visa, but when I used the system I was never charged. In 94, I was on a business trip in Paris, and one of the guys on my trip got sick so we took him to the hospital. The wait of course was hours, but when he was treated (if you can call it that), the staff made a point of explaining that in France no one had to pay for medical care, not even visitors. When I was a student I didn’t have to pay either, and when I was in London in 2000, I didn’t have to pay. Before I heard your story I was under the impression that in all these countries no one had to pay.
Sidd – are you sure you weren’t required to pay because somehow you had called in a private doctor? In any event, it is true that anecdotal evidence is unreliable, but I thought my stories were typical. I just thought it was a well settled fact that when anyone used the public health systems in Europe or Japan they always had a bad experience. Every pubic hospital I have ever seen in those countries was grimy and dirty. But maybe that assumption was wrong. I have to admit, I have heard some good stories (and of course bad stories) about Canada but never good stories about Europe or Japan (although I have to admit I don’t think I have ever heard anyone talk about Germany or Scandanavia).
In any event, it seems to me that no one has gotten the system right. So if we do change our health system none of those systems should be used as a model. |
