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LordOfLocksley@lemmy.world 2 months ago
My wife needed her gall bladder removed. She had many gallstones that were causing her extreme pain, which needed many trips to A&E to get Morphine based pain killers to deal with the pain. Mind you, she has a very high pain threshold. The NHS waiting time for the removal was 2-3 years.
Fortunately I have private family health insurance through work, so we went with that route. The time from referral, to having the operation was 4 weeks.
4 weeks of pain vs 2-3 years… it’s easy to see why people prefer private.
Photuris@lemmy.ml 2 months ago
purplemonkeymad@programming.dev 2 months ago
Doesn’t help that the Tories were “stressing” the NHS for years, which makes it harder for things to get back on track.
jabjoe@feddit.uk 2 months ago
Private health companies often use the same facilities and stuff as public health. It ends up basically paying to jump the queue. Also the private health companies take the low risk, glamorous stuff and leave the complex, high risk, unglamorous stuff to public health.
reddig33@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Privatize the profits, socialize the losses.
lost@lemmy.wtf 2 months ago
Yeah, but having to wait four years because you are poor doesn’t sound fair to me.
LordOfLocksley@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Oh I completely agree. Private and public funding options should be working in harmony, but private must be prevented from overreaching into the public sector
reddig33@lemmy.world 2 months ago
I have private insurance in the US. Trust me, it’s no faster after everything has gone private. The only difference is you pay two to three times as much, and end up saddled with medical debt. You should be thankful for NHS.
LordOfLocksley@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Oh I am 100% grateful for the NHS. I used to live in the Netherlands where it’s much closer to the US system, and I paid 3x more for basic insurance, than I do for private insurance in UK