Access to insulin

Posted Feb 9, 2019 22:05 UTC (Sat) by nix (subscriber, #2304)
In reply to: Access to insulin by Wol
Parent article: An open-source artificial pancreas

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so the Tories acted and very rapidly the not-at-all-politically-influenced think-tanker's suggestion happened to be withdrawn.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