Is this really what the Universal Health Care folks want for our country?

Patients across the country are waiting more than two years for a hearing aid, and up to five years to have old-fashioned equipment replaced by modern technology.





Almost 50,000 people, many of them elderly, are stuck on NHS waiting lists and 10 primary care trusts have admitted to delays of more than a year for patients in need of their first hearing aid.





The longest delays - of 125 weeks - were in Kingston, in south-west London, followed by Suffolk, Gloucestershire, Tyne and Wear, Ealing and Havering.





advertisementThe Royal National Institute for the Deaf, which uncovered the findings under the Freedom of Information Act, described the misery endured by thousands of Britons who are hard of hearing as a "national scandal" requiring urgent Government action.





A separate survey by the British Society of Audiologists found even longer delays for patients seeking to swap old-fashioned analogue hearing aids for modern digital ones recommended by the NHS.

Is this really what the Universal Health Care folks want for our country?
It is an inevitable result of national health care, but people don't like to learn from FACTS. This is why some people still pretend communism can work when it's been shown to be bankrupt repeatedly in every incarnation.





If all the people who CLAIM they would not mind paying the kind of taxes they would have to to bring this nightmare to the US would simply act usefully, we could fix the problems in OUR system.





spend some time paying attention to things the government does and demanding that the rule of law be applied instead of special deals for large insurers. There is NO legit reason why they should have an ERISA shield (read Jamie Cort's book "HMOs: Making a Killing), special tax breaks, and be allowed to dominate care decisions.





Read the GOOD ideas that some have about fixing the broken system and advocate for it. One such plan (and the book has many solid ideas on fixing the present system, increasing the number of doctors and nurses, reducing prescription costs, etc.) can be found in Save America, Save the World by Cassandra Nathan (read the PDF, not the blurb, here: http://www.booklocker.com/books/3068.htm...





Donate to medical charities--and consider your local churches. Many of them have parish nurses--their salaries are not THAT high that more congregations couldn't provide that kind of a benefit. There are labs out there that will go to grocery stores and charge reduced prices for anything from basic blood work to mammograms to allergy testing--no reason some groups (religious or not) couldn't arrange a deal with such a lab (they come to YOU) for a day or more and help some folks out who have needs.





The list goes on. Demand an accounting from the "non profit" hospitals--do they actually return the value of all those tax breaks to the community? Probably not anywhere close. Free care to illegals isn't their mission either. Do they engage in predatory lending practices against the uninsured citizens? http://www.businessweek.com/bwdaily/dnfl...





People could do plenty, but it's easier to scream that the government should do it. That's an UN-American attitude. We are a nation that built itself up to what we have from hard work, self-reliance, and providing charity, not the yoke of government around our necks.





People also need to educate themselves about the FACTS of all these government programs. They do NOT work as you believe they do. The media does NOT do its job in researching and presenting facts so the public is told sweeping statements "Medicare works" instead of the truth about it. Medicare premium 1998: $43.80, 2008 $964.0 up 120% in one decade. FACT: the ill on Medicare either have to have a "medigap" policy to HELP defray the 20% co-pays--and that comes out of their pockets on top of the Medicare premium OR go with an HMO that limits choices. However, the HMOs now for more expensive tests pass that 20% co-pay on to many AND in many cases the prescription drug coverage that was COMMON among HMOs long before Medicare D rolled into town has been REDUCED to conform to the asinine "donut hole" of coverage. There's a reason quite a few seniors are on Medicare AND Medicaid. That's just STUPID, taxpayers. IF Medicare were doing what it should, that would be a very rare thing. Also the government's pigheaded insanity of trying to balance this Ponzi scheme on the backs of doctors is driving them away from Medicare (as it did Medicaid):


"That dark cloud lurking over the shoulder of every Massachusetts physician is Medicare. If Congress does not act, doctors' payments from Medicare will be cut by about 5 percent annually, beginning next year through 2012, creating a financial hailstorm that would wreak havoc with already strained practices.





Cumulatively, the proposed cuts represent a 31 percent reduction in Medicare reimbursement. If the cuts are adjusted for practice-cost inflation, the American Medical Association says Medicare payment rates to physicians in 2013 would be less than half of what they were in 1991."


http://www.massmed.org/AM/Template.cfm?S...





We need to get the government OUT of health care and get the free market working.
Reply:Liberals never think about the consequences of their feel-good ideas. They just prefer to feel good about their intentions.
Reply:Let's see. I can die because I'm poor or I can wait for a new hearing aid?





Tough choice!
Reply:You cons are pathetic in cherry picking a problem and trying to claim its a system wide failing. Fact is there is no movement in Britian or other countries with universal healthcare to push for a private healthcare, because if there were, you would see HMOs pouring 10's of millions buying political support into those countries to scrape universal healthcare.





In those countries, you have elected officials accountable to fix that problem, in this country people are routinely delayed and denied health care by profiteering companies acountable to no one hoping you'll die and go away.
Reply:Socialized medicine if it is done properly can be very successful. The problems that you describe are the same problems that millions of uninsured and under-insured Americans have, only add on mass quantities of public and private debt. What many Americans do not understand is that we are all paying for it anyway and we are willing to go into debt fund an unnecessary and immoral war, perhaps we should re-evaluate our priorities.