HEY BERNIE: UK Patients Now Paying For Health Care To Skip The Wait List

Calling all those ‘health care is a human right’ peeps — what do you say to THIS?

In the UK, citizens have ‘free’ health care. It’s SO ‘free’ that their health services can even have veto power over your own medical choices.

Remember when Charlie Gard and Alfie Evans were each caught in a tug-of-war between parents desperately trying to save their children’s lives and an authoritarian medical system telling them ‘no’.

Bernie Bros and the Squad are quick to lecture us on all the reasons they think we have the ‘right’ to ‘free’ health care. What they don’t realize is that there is no such thing as a free lunch.

Most things labeled ‘free’ have some kind of hidden costs. Health care is no exception. In the UK, where health care is ‘free’, patients are voting with their feet and their wallets.

Now data from the Private Healthcare Information Network (PHIN) – shared exclusively with the Daily Mail – lays bare the devastating scale of the problem.

The government-backed body has had a legal duty to collate comprehensive data on private healthcare activity since 2016.

There were 49,700 such admissions between July and September 2019, rising 35 per cent to 67,100 in the same three months of 2021.

The number of privately funded hip operations has increased by 165 per cent over the same period, from 1,800 to 4,800, and knee replacements are up 122 per cent, from 1,100 to 2,500.

Cataract surgery rose by 64 per cent, from 9,100 to 13,200. All figures exclude bills settled by private medical insurance. —DailyMail

This trend of paying out of pocket, rather than waiting in line for the government ‘freebie’ is being driven by British patients getting sick of government waitlists for necessary care.

The article specifically highlights hip replacements, which can cost people well over six figures out of pocket.

It comes as the number of people in England on the NHS ‘trauma and orthopaedics’ waiting list, which includes hip and knee replacements, has risen from 525,801 in September 2019 to 699,962 in September 2021.

The average wait increased from 8.3 weeks to 13.7 weeks over that period, with the number waiting more than year climbing from 365 to 63,121.
…Almost half of Britons (48 per cent) would consider private healthcare if they needed treatment, according to a new poll by the Independent Healthcare Providers Network, which represents private providers.

…’Tens of thousands have been languishing in this waiting list limbo for years now and have little left to give, while thousands more join them each month. —DailyMail

(Remember that ‘death panels’ objection to government health care? This is another example of exactly the same root problem.)

As anyone familiar with the VA might know all too well, there is an upper limit to how much money the government has to pay for health care services. Like the rest of us, they have to work within a finite pool of dollars.

What does that look like in the case of government-funded health care? There are a few ways for administrators to manage costs.

One way is to narrow the scope of approved medical services. You will, for example, notice that many Canadians fly to the US (or other countries) in order to get services or even tests that simply are not available in the ‘free’ Canadian health care system. Sometimes those services include life-saving treatments. Here’s one example from a quick search of life-saving surgery that was denied to Canadians.

The other way is to limit the number of treatments that can be done in a given period — whether by controlling the number of doctors, the number of billable hours, or the number of specialized machines on which expensive treatments are performed.

In Canada, for instance, the wait times for medical imaging in the system offering ‘free’ health care look like this:

Patients also experience significant waiting times for various diagnostic technologies across the provinces. This year, Canadians could expect to wait 5.4 weeks for a computed tomography (CT) scan, 11.1 weeks for a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scan, and 3.5 weeks for an ultrasound. — FrasierInstitute

The explanation for such a problem from this study is out-of-date, but the since the problem persists, the cause likely does as well.

Bring these questions up with the ‘free healthcare’ Bernie Bros in your life and watch the blank expressions on their faces as they try to process this narrative-destroying information.

Psalms of War: Prayers That Literally Kick Ass is a collection, from the book of Psalms, regarding how David rolled in prayer. I bet you haven’t heard these read, prayed, or sung in church against our formidable enemies — and therein lies the Church’s problem. We’re not using the spiritual weapons God gave us to waylay the powers of darkness. It might be time to dust them off and offer ‘em up if you’re truly concerned about the state of Christ’s Church and of our nation.

Also included in this book, Psalms of War, are reproductions of the author’s original art from his Biblical Badass Series of oil paintings.

This is a great gift for the prayer warriors. Real. Raw. Relevant.