Cataracts, hips, knees and tonsils: NHS begins rationing operations
Two-thirds of health trusts in England are rationing treatments for “non-urgent” conditions as part of the drive to reduce costs in the NHS by £20bn over the next four years. One in three primary-care trusts (PCTs) has expanded the list of procedures it will restrict funding to in the past 12 months.
Because at a certain point free care becomes unsustainable. The first people to be affected will be people who paid into the system, not people who came to Britain (or France, or the United States) with their hands out looking for free stuff. Those people will always have “advocates” usually paid for with tax dollars, to help them game the system.
If you think I’m making that up, take a look at this video. Those are your tax dollars being used to help defraud the system. Which is paid for by your tax dollars as well.
Here is more from the original article,
Case study: ‘They changed the rules to save money’
Anne Ball, 71, is a retired business consultant who used to work in electronics
“I have bilateral cataracts and under the original NHS criteria I was entitled to have at least one of mine treated – but then the West Sussex health authorities decided to change the threshold level to save money.
“It’s like looking through gauze. Everything is foggy, and I’ve got quite a large ‘floater’ in my left eye. The consultant was as distressed as me, having to tell me, and he thought with my eyesight he wouldn’t be able to function.
“I’ve appealed because the cataracts are having a significant impact on my quality of life and it’s left me depressed and fearful about my low vision, which will continue to deteriorate. The new guidelines mean that people who fall below the standard set by the DVLA still do not qualify to have surgery. My vision is not good enough to drive at night.
“I’m not a cranky old lady. I’m the chair of a local village charity and I do a lot of computer work that is affected.
“It will just store up costs for future years, putting a strain on resources as more patients will end up in falls clinics. The longer you put it off the more complex the operation becomes and the riskier it is for the patient.”
Ms. Ball, they’re playing the odds. They are stalling, hoping you die from something else before they have to pay to have your cataracts corrected. That’s how they hope to achieve savings, by getting older people to do them the favor of croaking before they have to pay to fix their chronic problems.
Yeah, rationing will never happen under ObamaCare. /sarcasm
Don’t forget they will let the smallest die too. Right now, we’ll try to save any baby which is born alive. I think the earliest-gestation baby to survive was born at 21 weeks, but saving babies born at 22 or 23 weeks is no longer uncommon. In Europe they will not provide even basic lifesaving measures to babies born before something like 24 weeks (though it might be later than that), and in fact count these babies as stillbirths, which is part of the reason they appear to have better infant mortality stats than we do.
The last part of your comment is most interesting. I’ve never thought about it in those terms, which is probably what they intended. If you make a rule that all perinatal deaths under a certain gestational age are “still born” and not “live birth and then died” you can make your numbers look better. If you limit pre natal care for women with high risk pregnancies, you can make your numbers look even better. That’s if they do the latter.
Here’s a link to an article on the matter: http://health.usnews.com/usnews/health/articles/060924/2healy.htm
First, it’s shaky ground to compare U.S. infant mortality with reports from other countries. The United States counts all births as live if they show any sign of life, regardless of prematurity or size. This includes what many other countries report as stillbirths. In Austria and Germany, fetal weight must be at least 500 grams (1 pound) to count as a live birth; in other parts of Europe, such as Switzerland, the fetus must be at least 30 centimeters (12 inches) long. In Belgium and France, births at less than 26 weeks of pregnancy are registered as lifeless.