I'm sorry but this is just completely false. The UK health system has flaws yes but it is free at the point of use for anyone in the country and provides an extremely high level of care at a very low cost.
You have to wait for non-essential operations yes, and the less essential the longer you have to wait. That's because it's not a private health care system where your treatment is based on your ability to pay.
Of course you can always get better treatment if you want to pay to use it. You can do that in France if you like or you can do that in the UK.
As for your baby story I would like to see some evidence that a GP broke a baby's hand and then forced the parents to flee the country to avoid having their baby taken by social services.
What is extremely false? This was said at British parliament. To quote Cameron: "people had to dring from flower vase, not to die of thirst". There are thousands of deaths because of basic neglect.
As for my personal experience. I only wanted rentgen to see if my hand is broken. I could not just 'walk in' and buy a service, I would had to go through GP referral than booking specialist appointment and finally week latter have xray.
The Emergency Room is used by everyone who needs prescription for flu, so I had to wait 6 hours in bloody line full of coughing people. I should have probably just walk in front of the hospital and call myself ambulance from parking lot.
The healtcare is not free, as visitor from other EU country, my insurance company has to pay. Also local cresidents pay higher taxes. Sure there is no lawyer overhead, but that will only impress someone from US.
As for waiting for non-essential operations, you probably meant non-life threating. Some procedures solve crippling pain, but are rated non-essential.
And on top of that you can not choose hospital where you will go. Some hospitals are better, some are really bad. Obviously the elite lives in areas with better hospitals.
The story about baby was in national Slovak news, and forced embassy to step in. I am too lazy to look for english translation, but there are other similar cases. The time line in this case is this:
1) Slovak couple comes with six months baby in hospital, it cries and has something with hand. They claim it had vaccination one day before at the same hand.
2) Doctor makes xray, finds hand is broken and fixate it.
3) Hospital calls SS and police. Couple is escorted by police to court straight from hospital with baby.
4) They get advocate assigned from court and the hearing starts at the same evening (5 hours after they come into hospital)
5) Their defendant is arrogant, tell them to shut up and does not explain anything. Plus he does not speak slovak and their english is not adequate for this stuff
6) Court postpones decision into other hearing. They are free to leave. At outside police is waiting to seize baby, officers do not believe court did not made decision.
7) At 11 PM they finally arrive home from hospital with baby.
8) At 4 AM they decide to leave country, at 6 AM they are on airplane to continental europe.
9) At 7:30 AM police came at their london door with order to seize baby
10) 2 days latter they contact slovak police, disclose their location and ask for help. They also contact media.
I am really not going into more of those shit. I know several people who fled UK because of fear for their baby. Embassy even recommends to avoid giving birth in UK, since you could say something stupid, which would be held against you.
This was 'majority white' slovak couple. Slovak gypsies have situation much much worse in London. I am sometimes called racist, but what SS is doing to gypsies, is miles behind the line.
> What is extremely false? This was said at British parliament. To quote Cameron: "people had to dring from flower vase, not to die of thirst". There are thousands of deaths because of basic neglect.
That is not a direct quote, as I said there are flaws with the NHS but I dispute that there are thousands of deaths because of basic neglect. Feel free to provide data to backup your claims.
> As for my personal experience. I only wanted rentgen to see if my hand is broken. I could not just 'walk in' and buy a service, I would had to go through GP referral than booking specialist appointment and finally week latter have xray.
> The Emergency Room is used by everyone who needs prescription for flu, so I had to wait 6 hours in bloody line full of coughing people. I should have probably just walk in front of the hospital and call myself ambulance from parking lot.
You went to accident and emergency at a busy time and were treated based on the severity/priority of your injury/illness. I'm sorry you couldn't just buy your way to the front of the queue but that is a feature of the NHS.
> The healtcare is not free, as visitor from other EU country, my insurance company has to pay. Also local cresidents pay higher taxes. Sure there is no lawyer overhead, but that will only impress someone from US.
That is why I said 'free at the point of use'
> As for waiting for non-essential operations, you probably meant non-life threating. Some procedures solve crippling pain, but are rated non-essential.
No I meant non-essential, how fast you are treated is based on how urgently you need treatment.
> And on top of that you can not choose hospital where you will go. Some hospitals are better, some are really bad. Obviously the elite lives in areas with better hospitals.
Actually yes you can choose where you go. Of course some hospitals are better than others, that is true in every country in the world.
> The story about baby was in national Slovak news, and forced embassy to step in. I am too lazy to look for english translation, but there are other similar cases. The time line in this case is this:
Once again I would like to see some proof that this story ever happened.
> Embassy even recommends to avoid giving birth in UK, since you could say something stupid, which would be held against you.
Really, which embassy? Please point me to where they recommend that you avoid giving birth in the UK.
You obviously have an issue with the NHS and I am more than happy to admit it is far from perfect however I would appreciate if you're going to criticise it you do so based on facts not fairy stories.
Did not Cameron just apologize for several deaths?
I have no issue with NHS on its own. It is pretty much average European health care system. But I hate smuginess surrounding it and connection to fascist state.
Fascism is a fairly specific thing. The UK has many problems, but I do not think you could reasonably claim that it is a fascist state. While there are some extreme nationalists in the UK, most people seem to regard them as a joke. Most people in Britain don't take its leaders and institutions seriously enough to give fascism ground to flourish. Fascism requires keeping a level of serious respect of the state and it's representatives, that leaves its supporters wide open for general piss taking.
Of course the UK does have some appalling bigots, some of them in positions of power, and it also has some appalling history, especially in connection to empire, but that does not make it a fascist state.
One of the definitions is that government has total control.
That's the definition for totalitarianism. You need to couple that with populist extreme nationalism and state corporatism to really be properly fascist though.
If you want to understand how the UK social services manages sometimes to be quite so completely fucked up (and I am in no way denying that they can be scary fuckers), you need to understand the confluence of the British jobsworth, combined with really bad incentives. Using the epithet fascist doesn't really tell you anything about this though.
To put it simply, the professional penalty for wrongly taking kids away is much much lower than the professional penalty if something goes wrong through inaction. This is due to a series of high profile cases where kids died after not being taken from their parents. Unfortunately there are also a lot of jobsworth box tickers throughout the UK bureaucracy.
This is not all of them, but there are enough that when coupled with a system that doesn't really punish them as long as they are seen to be doing something, encourages some really dark Kafkaesque insanity.
You have to wait for non-essential operations yes, and the less essential the longer you have to wait. That's because it's not a private health care system where your treatment is based on your ability to pay. Of course you can always get better treatment if you want to pay to use it. You can do that in France if you like or you can do that in the UK.
As for your baby story I would like to see some evidence that a GP broke a baby's hand and then forced the parents to flee the country to avoid having their baby taken by social services.