Health Secretary Postman Pat laughing yesterday when Dr Rant confronted him with evidence that that for the first time since the NHS was created, cancer patients were being pushed to bankruptcy by his inhuman policies.
'Fuck em! I've always hated sick people. Besides, these fuckers will be dead before the next election, and dead people don't vote. And you can quote me on that!' he scoffed.
Like watching a train crash in slow motion, the morally bankrupt free fall of NHS standards just continues to facinate, astonish, and horrify in equal measures.
Free at the point of need.
That's was the NHS's mission.
When PBS Frontline recently did a program in the US on health care systems around the world, one question that the anchor asked of health officials in all the countries he visited was: "How many people go bankrupt each year in your country from health care costs". The responses he had ranged from amusement to bemusement, and all said 'None'. 'It does not happen'. 'It is unheard of'. In the US a third of all personal bankruptcies are due to medical expenses.
Well, the UK may very soon be able to add itself to the very short list of developed nations in which people go bankrupt because of health care costs.
Yes, Postman Pat - that champion of the working class - has issued guidance that patients who dare to buy in private provision for a portion of their care (say, unfunded cancer drugs) forfeit their right to NHS care.
Several PCOs around the cuntry [Not a spelling error - Ed.] are billing cancer sufferers tens of thousands of pounds for their NHS care.
Even seasoned Dr Rant readers may need that bit repeating. If you buy a drug yourself, you will have your NHS rights stripped from you. No matter that you are a tax payer. Not even the morally dubious argument aimed at smokers and alcoholics that they 'brought it on themselves'. Just the utterly inhuman decision to bill patients for all of their cancer care costs if they dare to pay for drugs that the NHS won't.
Think about this. If the patient then runs out of money, in theory they will receive no care at all. They will have to beg for care or simply be turned away at the door to die in the street.
I'm totally, fucking, speechless.
Short of simply marching people out and having them shot, could those Zanu-Labour cunts become more despicable?
Anyone?
Update:
Doctors for Reform, are mounting a legal challenge as we speak. Thank fuck someone has some in the NHS has a backbone about this. [Oops - initially mixed up DfR with RemedyUK - Ed.]
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40 comments:
I have a patient who buys his own cancer meds (Sutent) but gets the rest of his treatment on the NHS still. He pays no NHS fees, he only pays me for his Sutent (which I give him at cost price).
Not sure why this should be, surely not because his meds are oral and not parental? Has he slipped through the net possibly? Or maybe it's because there was a big media campaign to raise funds for his medication.
Either way it is a bit odd and suggests your chances of having to pay for your treatment vary with you address.
mrhunnybun, it's an 'address' thing, yes; a PCT thing or Hospital Trust thing.
I don't see the refusal to supply treatment free to someone who's chosen to pay for part of it as at all disgraceful. (I wouldn't have a private knee op not available on the NHS but demand that everything except that procdure -- everything; the nursing, the porters, the physio... -- be provided by the NHS.) I do though think judicial review a good idea. Also I would (reluctantly) support a heavily means-tested co-pay system that might enable the poor, also, to get the drugs in question.
More at Dr Crippens (not for me, I've had enough) but meanwhile and NB; Alan Johnson is actually being pretty Old Labour in this instance.
(procedure!)
"Britain has the worst cancer survival rates in Europe". - The Sunday Times 01/06/2008. Is that purely down to NICE? Hunnybun would suggest that patients get drugs by post code to varying degrees. Could it be the docs are a part of the problem? Hate to suggest that given runt has assured me that you are indeed the best in the world. Well, the rest of the world, outside Europe according to the Times, the US according to their outcome data, Australia, most of the pac rim...........................................
By the way runt you won't like Drs For Reform, they advocate a much larger role for the private sector.
Actually, I don't mind DfR too much (they advocate a German-style Social Insurance model of care IIRC) but you are right, Anon, I initially mixed them up with RemedyUK. I've corrected the 'update'.
Jayanne,
The analogy with a private knee op is incorrect.
Firstly, the correct analogy would be with having an NHS knee op but wanting to pay for a more expensive prosthesis to be used during that NHS op because the NHS would only pay for the cheap one.
Secondly, a knee op is not life-threatening (usually!) and the costs, including follow up, can be predicted and won't bankrupt you.
Thirdly, if something goes wrong with your knee op, you will not be asked to pay for the NHS treatment required (for example, a week on CCU after you suffer an cardiac arrest on the table).
Cancer care is highly, highly expensive. If you are going to bankrupt yourself with a medical illness, terminal cancer is a good choice.
And when do you draw the line? What if the cancer recurs a year later? Ten years later? Twenty years later? What about your terminal care?
It is inhuman.
unfortunately I agree with rant. There has to be change in the funding mechanism that reflects today's society not the 40's. German system is not a bad one to look at.
You can also see how this is a slippery slope for the NHS with the current funding system.
NIKU agrees with Rant...
dr rant, I didn't think my analogy was that great, honestly; I chose it because I may well need a knee op (I'm hoping not to) and if so will have it privately given the waiting lists in Wales. I took out private medical insurance because my bank manager 'offered' it while I was asking for a loan...; I assumed I wouldn't use it, ever; then I moved to Wales...
Thirdly, if something goes wrong with your knee op, you will not be asked to pay for the NHS treatment required (for example, a week on CCU after you suffer an cardiac arrest on the table).
also true for cancer (I happen to know this because of a rather nasty case of 'side effects' of cancer treatment in a BUPA hospital; UHW took over, free, yes.
Also, rant
And when do you draw the line? What if the cancer recurs a year later? Ten years later? Twenty years later? What about your terminal care?
the rules are in one instance ambiguous (the legal challenge may relate to that, but I doubt it; I think DFR want more...); but in the type of case you state, they are clear. If the cancer recurs NHS treatment will be given, whenever it recurs. Nothing in the rules can be used to argue that that should not happen.
It is inhuman.
letting people who can't pay suffer is inhuman. Having two NHS patients side by side, one receiving a drug denied to the other, because one can pay, is inhuman. And the postcode/Trust lottery is inhuman, in this type of case, you may want to argue, particularly so.
But the basic NHS *or* private rule is not inhuman.
This policy is utter twaddle. If anyone could point me to ANY legal basis for stripping patients of their care because they choose to pay for supplementary drugs I would be very surprised.
The first patient that launches a legal challenge against this will register a major victory against Zanu-LP.
Well done Labour, another feather in your cap!
I can kind-of see the point of the guidelines, but as usual the government approach is akin to usin a spacehopper to crack a nut.
What they are trying to avoid is a true 2 tier health service (let's pretend for a second that we don't have one already) where people with money can buy he extra drugs, nurses, clean beds that the NHS doesn't cover.
To some people, this is the thin end of a scary wedge - one minute people are paying to get the latest cancer drug that the tabloids are hailing as a miracle (while the actual trial results show something more modest) the next minute, people have to pay to get post-operative analgesia.
The actual point is if (if) the drugs work, then the sodding NHS should be paying for them. If stuff doesn't work (homeopathy, internal markets, polyclinics, IT systems) then the NHS should not be sodding well paying for them.
I realise that ultimately there is always a degree of rationing in healthcare, but there are two choices as to how you do it:
1. THe US/no-one approach, where healthcare is rationed by what *I* can afford
2. The NHS system where healthcare is rationed by what *we* can afford
I agree let's hide the two tiered system problem and ignore it exists. people already get different care because of the ability to pay. All you do by insisting there is equality amongst those who can't is bring the end of the NHS closer faster. Those people who can pay are becoming a larger part of our society and will use the NHS less drawing resource into the private side of medicine. That will ultimately be the current systems downfall leaving it as the health system of last resort for the poor.
NIKU We already have a system where better off people who can afford to pay more chip in a little extra for their care. It's called Income Tax.
Can I just clarify your position here: do you think it's OK for people to be denied treatement because they are, say, a primary school teacher rather than Richard Desmond?
Essentially,the Labour party would rather let cancer patients (who could afford a superior drug) die rather than the public find out that some of them are on inferior treatment compared to the rest of the developed world e.g.Scotland where many more cancer drugs are provided on the NHS.It stinks.
The reality of rationing, or "priority setting" as Neolithic Labour lie to call it.
The NHS is finite, and won't always afford everything.
However when you see cancer patients unable to get treatment whilst NHS can spend fortunes on NPfIT, management consultants and redisorganisations I realise again why we get so sad/angry on this blog.
It's an issue of justice versus bureaucratic pharisees.
If there is a cancer in NHS that needs extirpating it's the management, not the treating doctors and nurses.
herring - not what I said at all. The champagne socialists would love to deny access to private care for people not able to pay for it and have, as have the consultants and others in the NHS. Why do you think there has been such a backlash to the any willing provider policy out of the DofH? Effectively, that leaves in place the old system where only the well healed get access to clean private hospitals.
We already have a two tiered system, if you want to be fair, open the NHS supplier community up so that people who can't afford private insurance can access private providers free at the point of service through their NHS benefit. Well two reasons really, consultants would see their private incomes come under pressure, and the staff in the NHS would have to compete, might loose their jobs, actually work for a living.
Wow, many thanks for the update, had completely missed the income tax thing.
N-I-K-U
NHS staff might have to "actually work for a living".
Fucking hell, I nearly choked on my corn flakes after reading that line.
Correct me if I'm wrong but it wasn't that long ago that some junior doctors worked 100+ hrs per week ?
Apart from the fact they were paid for less than 40% of their time, try to imagine the effects of cramming the best part of x3 weeks stressful labour into 7 days.
Oh, the nurses might lose breaks, or work on at the end of a shift but these extras pale into insignificance compared to the sysphian work ethic of the junior docs.
As a matter of interest N-I-K-U can you tell me which other group of professional ROUTINELY put in a free weeks worth of work ?
One doctor actually dropped dead after an 86hr shift.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/1501153.stm
...actually work for a living.
ooh, you comedian.
Dr Rant you are truely a star!
If trolls don't like your views, why do they read your posts. If you don't like it don't read it. i wouldn't read the NuLabour Party Manifesto if my life depended on it! Or if it meant life saving Cancer treatment for that matter!
Dr Rant, please keep ranting!
"We're getting 10 per cent less for every pound spent in the NHS than we were 10 years ago. This shocking failure is the result of the tired strategy of spending ever more money within the existing system instead of learning lessons from how other European countries organise health care and putting in place genuine reforms."Matthew Sinclair, policy analyst at the TaxPayers' Alliance
The ONS report says NHS output in terms of operations, consultations, drugs and fewer deaths has risen by half between 1995 and 2006 but the annual budget over the same period more than doubled from £39 billion to £89.7 billion.
don't you hate facts i charge to be a nurse. and can you stop that poor little junior doc crap. it's their job if they don't like it they can leave, we have too many anyway.
""We're getting 10 per cent less for every pound spent in the NHS than we were 10 years ago.""
You don't think this might have a little bit to do with inflation then?
That's odd...
I'd better watch out if I buy Gaviscon to sort out my refluxes after an oesophagectomy. I admit nothing!
N-I-K-U
The NHS already has a relatively low ratio of doctors per 1,000 patients (when compared to France, Germany, Italy, Holland, Switzerland, etc) - I simply do not understand how you can claim that we have "too many (doctors) anyway".
Yes, expenditure on health has increased recently but we still spend less than the Germans, French and Swiss, and always have done - the gap which historically was substantial has reduced that's all.
Look at the USA which spends nearly 17% of GDP (on health) while the NHS figure remains below 10%.
You may dismiss my comments about doctors putting in a full weeks work.....GRATIS.
But I note you fail to highlight any other group of public sector, or indeed private sector workers who ROUTINELY make similar sacrifices.
The success of the NHS was largely due to the dedication of GPs and junior doctors....abley supported by the nurses, of course - but despite the extra injection of cash the NHS is starting to unravel, thanks to the interminable meddling of the NuLab control freaks.
UK spend on health when you include central costs and pensions is north of 12%. The US GDP spend is 15%. The numbers are not that dissimilar. What does astound me is that our outcomes in this country are some of the worst in europe and that is when we are compared against some countries who spend 50% of what we do.
Why can't you admit that outcomes rely on medics and not managers or politicians. You have more than most to do your job and yet what you produce is at the bottom of the pile. How do YOU explain this very clear divergence????? Maybe it is my fault because of all the negative waves I produce?
N-I-K-U
Certainly unhealthy life style choices such as smoking, obesity, or too much booze (and illicit drug taking) all contribute to outcomes.
The prognosis for an over-weight, life long smoking Brit who is partial to a nip most days is probably worse compared to the slightly more sophisticated French counterpart, say.
If you want evidence that too many Brits ignore sensible advice from the outset look the rates of teenage pregnancy (some of the highest in Europe), not to mention STIs such as chlamydia.
Perhaps YOU blame doctors for these stats as well ?
Anyway overall mortality rates do not vary that significantly especially when life style choices are factored into the equation.
A few more Europeans survive slightly longer with metastatic cancer, or advanced cardio-vascular diseases, a triumph of sorts I suppose ?
Why would you use gaviscon to cure your 'refluxes' after an oesophagectomy. There's nothing to reflux in to you fucking bellend!
Kind of reminds me of a urology ward round I was on (thankfully) several years ago. Patient had had his last remaining kidney out and was unsuprisingly not passing any urine. As we were discussing changing over the type of dialysis and getting him transferred a nurse chipped in 'give him frusemide!'
fuckin incredible.
I am not totally familiar with the German system but I think the state there guarantees care and then you can top up. How much you want to top up is up to you. And the norm is two bed rooms.
When my mum died of pancreatic Ca last year her initial treatment at North Manchester General Hospital was good from a medical point of view, but the surgical ward was a fucking disgrace. The beds were very close together and the nurses were so short staffed (and reliant on an ever changing motley crue of agency staff) they didn't have a fucking clue who each other were never mind the names or medical histories of the patients.
Jayann: you're a fucking arsehole mate.
"it's their job if they don't like it they can leave, we have too many anyway. "
Ah, the old slavery card.
This is very revealing of the Fuckwit Epidemia that Trollonymous/No-One/NIKU represent.
Basically, they think that the NHS's woes are all down to lazy, overpaid, arrogant doctors.
Never mind the cut backs in the number of doctors, cutbacks in the number of nurses, cutbacks in the number of physios, ambulance cutbacks, porter cutbacks, etc., etc., etc..
Never mind that the number of managers continues to skyrocket (there are now more managers than nurses in the NHS).
Never mind that Fuckwits Anonymous have demonstrated over, and over, and over, and over, and over again their ignorance of the subject.
No, apparently it is all because NHS doctors are uniquely selfish, arrogant, bastards. The rest of the world has good doctors.
We are unique.
We are responsible for all of the problems of the NHS.
That is the Fuckwit Epidemic in action. An army of ignorant, arrogant, opinionated, morons.
"No, apparently it is all because NHS doctors are uniquely selfish, arrogant, bastards. The rest of the world has good doctors."
Damn runt, got it in one. Now that you have admitted you have a problem, can we work on a cure?
I am very proud of you, really.
"and can you stop that poor little junior doc crap. it's their job if they don't like it they can leave, we have too many anyway."
You complete freak, just because employees are abused doesn't mean they should have to take it. A girl I know in the Rep of Ireland was forced to work 60 hour shifts and lost her baby after one of these. She sued-and surprise surprise, she won. Because it's WRONG to treat workers like that. Even if they are-shock horror-evil doctors!
too bad as a mother she didn't have the common sense to refuse, if indeed it happened, i find these little anecdotal stories about hared done by doctors rather suspect. You are always telling everyone here what intellectual giants your are. seems to me you should be able to look after yourselves. The truth is you blow out of proportion these "stories" to make your claims of being poor abused doctors look better.
If your example was a woman who was working in a job that was paying the minimum wage and she had a limited educational background I would agree it was a horrible thing to have happen. She has NO control over her environment.
Your continual assertion that doctors are "abused" makes sense if it is GP's as they tend to be reasonably thick and would most likely require help looking after themselves.
I dont believe your story, but if it were true. What a load of crap it would be that a poor educated doctor was "forced" to work 60 hours and didn't, even though she should know it was dangerous, refuse. If a court had awarded her money, what a waste of public funds. They should have dismissed the case a self-inflicted problem. This is a continuation on this blog of the "we are all helpless victims" theme. The authorities should have then prosecuted every doctor she worked with for malpractice and thrown the senior doctor in jail for murder. Now that would have been the correct action to take. Sue the shit out of you bastards, live in your homes, drive your cars, make your lack of action and bad practice have real financial consequences.
The laws you refer to should protect the Polish worker who is not a part of the establishment, does not have anyone to turn to to help them with 14+ hour shifts in a muddy wet field picking radishes, not a bunch of elitist cry babies who hide behind bullshit stories about 60 hour shifts and loosing babies.
NIKU, did a doctor fuck you in the arse with a broomstick as a child?
If not, would you like one to now?
Cunt.
Hmmmm yet again professionalism on the Rant site!
I was over in Canada visiting a friend who emigrated there in the 1960s (the last time NHS doctors jumped ship in large numbers).
He works in a deprived area next to a First Nations reserve and he has fostered several First Nation children.
He told me a story about his foster son's reaction to the nurses going on strike some years ago:
"They are white. Why would they need to go on strike? All white people are rich!"
NIKU seems to have the same view of junior doctors. How can doctors be abused? They are all rich and clever!
Clearly, the ignorance runs almost as deep in Fuckwits Anonymous as the desire to spray their ignorant ejaculations that they consider 'views' onto the rest of us.
Junior doctors are an extremely vulnerable group. They have worked very hard for years in a highly competitive environment. They have been trained from day one that anyone who shows weakness will be dumped without warning from the system.
You show me someone who is willing to throw away 15 or more years of their lives and become an outcast to all of their friends and colleagues, to suffer the shame of being viewed as 'not having what it takes' in one of the most matcho training systems outside the armed forces, and I will show you someone who is a broken person.
Doctors know that if they go off sick, it is the patients and their colleagues that will suffer. Management will do everything possible to not get in a locum. Management don't care if patients or doctors suffer or die, so long as they save money.
I've known doctors who were being advised that they neeed to be admitted to hospital as an emergency, being threatened by management with breach of contract and a GMC referral if they left their post.
I'm not going to describe to you the dark thoughts that enter my head when I read comments like yours. Thoughts that come from watching the suffering that the system wreaked on young innocents who were only there to help.
You have no fucking clue, NIKU. You have no fucking clue. I wouldn't give the hair of a single SHO's head for your entire life.
anonymous: I wondered when you'd come back, you pharisaical cunt. May I recommend that you go and fist your mother?
(Bonus points if she's dead and you dig her up. If she's been cremated, sticking your fist into the lit furnace will do.)
Oh rant does indeed attract scum.
"They are white. Why would they need to go on strike? All white people are rich!"
that's understandable, dr rant. And an 'all doctors are rich/no doctor is mistreated' would be understandable coming from certain people in the UK. But NIKU is I think not one of them.
NIKU junior doctors have collapsed and died from overwork. (Here -- the EWTD has made things better --, in the US, in Japan.) Others are 'merely' subject to the kind of overwork known to damage DNA, I assume, irretrievably. Some doctors should be more ready to accept that others, too, can be subject to such overwork, of course.
dr rant, have you read Relative Deprivation and Social Justice? One of the things it illustrates is the lack of knowledge, among one class, of the living conditions of others. I've long wanted to see it re-done and particularly now, when social mobility's fallen and inequality risen so much. (IOW the 'ignorant' are not necessarily to blame.)
NIKU,
In whose interest do you think that pregnant doctor was working. Whose sister did she prescribe analgesis for at 0600? Whose distressed mother did she counsel after being given a serious diagnosis? How many hours was she working when she was faced with a decision to see either the 80 year old man collapsed on T4 or the 24 year old with profuse rectal bleeding at the other end of the hospital? Was she squeezing bags of blood into that young man, with his girlfriend and family screaming at her to save him when the cramps started?
It's called empathy and self-sacrifice. It's called call of duty and other stupid things. It's not big or clever. But it's the broken stretched system doctors and nurses work in. We are always on the edge. People die when it goes wrong and sometimes it isn't patients.
Think about it NIKU. And come back to me.
Oh get over yourselves!
This is a response to NIKU. Not an appeal to sympathy. It can be relentless out there. Hard working medics dont deserve the inflammatory bile spewing forth from NIKU's hole especially this one.
NIKU?
I entirely approve of your use of anglo-saxon to describe Zanu-Labour.
I am not really an NHS user (prefering witch doctors) and I certainly dont want to end up in an NHS hospital when I am checking out. My ideal exit would be a prescription of six pieces of hardware and five Nu Labour politicians of choice.
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