If it's signed and has the date of 1981 on it, and not from either the USA or UK I might take this into consideration. Piskie did say he used to live in the USA. This seriously makes me question the purpose of his visit.
I'll have a word with Saintsfan. I'm sure he's got a stack Irish Daily Mirrors at home, probably got one from 1981 that I can scribble my name on
The NHS is horrendously wasteful, and there's no desire to change that as the more they waste the more money those running it will receive. Thatcher's plan has nearly come to fruition.
Not really. The poor are still able to get treatment. They were supposed to have all been culled by now
Thatcher's plan was to have a private healthcare system like the USA, that is almost coming to fruition, but it's not because of waste in the NHS, it's due to a lack of adequate funding, increasing and ageing population and more of the budget being given to private heath companies.
Granted, I haven't used the NHS in 20 years, so sounds like it's gone spectacularly downhill from when I lived there, but I remember a service where you goto the doctor at your appointment time and be seen pretty quickly, there might be a short wait but you'd actually see the doctor. Here in the US with a private system. You have an appointment. If you're late they charge you $100 or more for inconveniencing them. However, you won't get seen until an hour after your appointment, and then only by a nurse who takes your vitals and asks you about your problems. You get left in an examination room after that, maybe for another hour or longer. Then the doctor comes in, spends at most 5 minutes with you, they base their diagnosis almost purely on what the nurse wrote down and what the nurse observed. I've spent 4 hours in a doctor's office here and only saw the doctor for a few minutes. Then you get a bill in the mail for anything from hundreds of dollars to thousands of dollars. A well visit annual checkup can be $300... And that's after insurance (which I pay about $1800 a month into to cover family) has paid a chunk. I can't for one minute believe the NHS is anywhere near as bad as the American system yet.
I have friends who live in Ojai, near ventura. They pay around $800pcm for very basic healthcare that like you say, doesn't even cover trips to the doctor, or any prescriptions. The NHS is heading in this direction as more and more of the services are being contracted out to private health providers, who like an business, run their operations for profit.
Yeah mines higher than $800 because it covers entire family. The Mrs. doesn't work so she's on my insurance. Meanwhile doctors making $300,000 a year complain about not getting paid when some homeless.guy ends up in a hospital with a heart attack without insurance and they try to throw him out and the law makes them treat him. (I have family and in laws who are doctors... Sickening to hear them complain about times when they couldn't get out of treating someone poor who couldn't afford insurance that had a serious disease)
My friends are an older couple with grown up children, so their healthcare insurance just covers them. I really despair hearing the stories from the US, especially seeing as Trump wants to dismantle Obama-care. Even more despairing is seeing our NHS going down the same route. As I've said before, the Tories end game is to run the NHS into the ground, then announce that it's no longer fit for purpose, which at that point they will bring in the big private health companies to 'save the day'
That sounds **** tbh. Maybe why addiction in America is such an epidemic? Usually when on daily Class A drugs you don't get ill. Basically spend your $800+pcm on heroin and crack and you shouldn't need healthcare. Pro's and Con's to either scenario tbf.
Part of it is down to subscribing lots of prescription drugs, IIRC. 80 percent of the global opioid supply is consumed in the United States. Lots and lots of painkillers, which are totally different to those bad, illegal drugs.
Addiction in the US is dealt with through the criminal justice system, rather than the health care system. In the UK we are at least trying to deal with addictions through giving people the right support, but both here and in the US, the prisons are crowded with people with drug addictions and mental health problems.
Yeah the Dr's hand our Perocets like smarties over there, so I hear. America is just totally ****ed in almost every way.
The US Prison industry. It's a big money maker for some very rich people. Don't worry about all those peons being locked up. Most of them aren't white, anyway.
Yeah a good documentry about the US and drugs, prison etc is 'The House I live In' - brilliant watch, it's on Netflix. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2125653/ But yeah during my time working in the prisons I witnessed some very sad things. People that clearly shouldn't be there just left sweating in a cell. Forced withdrawal from **** loads of meds they've had forced down their throats.
The 13th Amendment is so clever it's transferred slavery to the prison system and society falls for this bollocks.
Sickening really. And not dissimilar to big pharma in some respects, in that it pays to have people dependent on their system.
