Access to insulin

Posted Feb 7, 2019 17:54 UTC (Thu) by Wol (subscriber, #4433)
In reply to: Access to insulin by marcH
Parent article: An open-source artificial pancreas

Sounds a bit like the UK system in some ways. Apart from the fact that the system is creaking at breaking point (because of similar crazy beliefs like trying to keep costs down by keeping wages down, so rather than employing nurses directly they are forced to buy in agency nurses at four times the cost ...) healthcare is readily available and not bad.

But there are easy ways to bring in money that are ignored. Allow people who are on sick pay to jump the queue to get them back to work ... especially if they or the company will chip in some money. Allow people to have private rooms and public healthcare if they want to pay for it...

I'm sure there's plenty more easy money saving fixes if only political dogma didn't get in the way ... our air ambulance system survives on charity money, yet getting a seriously injured patient to hospital an hour earlier saves more money in intensive care than it cost to fly the ambulance - so why isn't some of that saved money diverted to the air ambulance service?

From what I've seen of the Australian system (not a lot :-) I get the impression that it does a very good job of providing affordable health care with choice. But "choice" is a dirty word among patients here because we are being pushed to choose for ourselves based on no evidence whatsoever, and my personal experience is that (a) there is little choice and (b) if you're not happy it's very hard to switch.

Cheers,
Wol

Access to insulin

Posted Feb 9, 2019 22:05 UTC (Sat) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] (1 responses)

Allow people who are on sick pay to jump the queue to get them back to work ... especially if they or the company will chip in some money.

That was in fact proposed, but then it was pointed out that this led to effective denial of healthcare to people not in work and/or whose employers will not pay when the system is under any sort of stress at all (e.g. all winter, every winter). This includes many old people, who tend to vote and vote Conservative, so the Tories acted and very rapidly the not-at-all-politically-influenced think-tanker's suggestion happened to be withdrawn. Funny that. (The think tanker used to work for... a US HMO! And went back to work for an HMO shortly afterwards. One of the other suggestions in the same report was that HMOs should "assist" with healthcare provision "in this time of crisis". Funny that.)

Access to insulin

Posted Feb 13, 2019 18:05 UTC (Wed) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

> That was in fact proposed, but then it was pointed out that this led to effective denial of healthcare to people not in work and/or whose employers will not pay when the system is under any sort of stress at all

Hmmm... I was thinking along the lines - like with the air ambulance example - of the money being diverted from other budgets.

I know it's tricky, but surely it's not beyond the wit of man to come up with some way of the DWP (Department of Work and Pensions, responsible for sick pay) working out how much someone is going to cost on sick pay, and then paying that money to the NHS for a "private" operation if that is going to cost less. So it's funded from a completely different budget to that for the old/unemployed.

Cheers,
Wol