3. Healthcare
The Bri'ish are very good at inventing things. Specifically, they invent something, get it horribly wrong because they have no idea what they are doing, then other countries fix it and do it better. The British then insist that their way was better and continue doing the thing they were always doing it, and Britain becomes a shithole as a consequence because learning best practice from *spit* foreigners is tantamount to inviting Hitler to be the Queen or something (despite the fact that the Royal Family are already as German as a sausage made out of Panzers and football trophies, but shhh).
We invented trains. We then built our bridges too low, our tunnels too small and our tracks with curves that were far too sharp, making our railways the worst in the Western world and not economically feasible to fix. We invented countless sports (more on those in another post) and then the rest of the world started thrashing us at all of them. We invented America only to have America kick our asses. We invented capitalism and ended up having our economy bailed out by the IMF in 1976 (adjusting for inflation, it remains the biggest loan the IMF ever sent anyone and we were still paying it off until 2010).
And we invented socialised healthcare.
Is the British healthcare system better than the American one?
Yes. Is it very nearly the worst healthcare system in the Western world? Also yes.
This isn't because the NHS is good. It's because the American system is shit. Forget how it's funded for now. The US has the worst healthcare statistics anywhere in the West, however you measure it. Americans pay more (as a percentage of GDP) than anywhere else in the West for worse healthcare than anywhere else in the West. The worst doctor-patient ratio, the worst dignosis rates, the highest negligence and malpractice rates, the lowest recovery rates for almost every fatal disease, and the worst rates for preventing avoidable diseases.
Look at it this way. The operation I am currently recovering from was done entirely privately and funded (apart from $200 for the initial meeting with the surgeon) entirely by private insurance that costs me a whopping $15 a month. The amount the entire operation cost me and my insurers put together was less than HALF what it would have cost in the USA, and I would be statistically more likely to develop a complication or even die in the USA as well.
If I had (as an increasing number of desperate Brits are starting to do, including some of my friends) gone abroad to Romania or Turkey to have it, it would have cost half as much AGAIN and not been any riskier (seriously, if you're a Brit and you're stuck on an interminable NHS surgery waiting list or you don't trust sleepy NHS doctors to not remove the wrong organ, look into Romania - cheap, quality surgery in luxury surroundings is becoming a serious industry there and you will be treated like royalty rather than resource-sapping scum like you would in the filthy Soviet misery cubes they call NHS hospitals).
Most Brits don't understand the US healthcare system in the slightest. Whilst it is pretty bad, it's not as bad as your average Brit thinks it is. As far as we are concerned, if you show up bleeding on the doorstep of an American hospital, they will administer a paper bag test and rummage through your wallet for your credit cards. Fail either of those tests, and they chuck you back into the street to bleed out, then sue you for getting their steps dirty. Brits have no idea what Medicare or Medicaid are or what they do, and they think that Obamacare was an American NHS that would have solved every problem and that Bad Orange Man sabotaged it because he masturbates to dying children then smears their liver bile over his face for that fresh orange glow.
Why is this? It's because of the Labour Party and their allies in the BBC. Allow me to explain.
There are very few things that the Labour party have done that are still popular. They nationalised a vast number of industries (everything from holiday tour operators to road haulage, the railways, airlines and carmakers), and ran them all into the ground while the rest of the world surged past us. Until 1987, if you wanted a telephone, you had to apply to the Post Office for one and it would take months to be installed, if the installers weren't on strike which they usually were, and your phone would be shit. Labour enthusiastially promoted the uncontrolled trade union militancy of the 1970s (which reduced the UK to an official 3-day working week to save electricity at one point, so many coal miners and power workers were on strike) then openly opposed Thatcher's campaign of taming them in the 1980s. They opposed the Falklands war, and said we should just hand over our territory to any two-bit junta that invades it because something something Imperialism (even though the Falklands have been British since before Argentina even existed and if anyone was being Imperialist it was the Argies). Thatcher won that war in large part just to spite the Labour party and it made her massively popular (oh yeah, and the Americans didn't lift a finger to help - "An Attack on One is an Attack on All" my hairy 3-buttocked arse, and we'll remember that if the Chinese invade Guam or something).
The Labour party adopted an openly pro-Soviet attitude during the height of the Cold War. It later emerged from the Mitrokhin archives that Labour had been infiltrated by the Stasi and the KGB, and that Brezhnev saw Labour governments as a way to keep Britain weak and did whatever he could to get them into power - Thatcher on the other hand made the Soviets shit themselves in fear.
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(John Major not so much)
Then Blair brought you the chaos of Devolution and our reviled participation in the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. Now of course the wokescolds have invaded Labour and call working-class Northerners racist for objecting when Pakistani rape gangs kidnap their daughters and use them as living sex toys. The same Pakistani immigrants welcomed into this country by, of course, the Labour party. Basically, everything of significance the Labour Party ever did is now hated by everyone.
Except the NHS.
Basically the NHS is now the only significant thing the British Left has done that people still like. And they only still like it due to a 75-year propaganda campaign that has even been adopted by the Conservatives because they are so frightened of being seen to be against it. The standard employment contract for most NHS workers makes criticising the NHS on social media a disciplinary offence. The American system (which remember the British think is even more barbaric than it actually is) is used as a boogeyman and presented as the only possible alternative whenever anyone dares to raise the possibility of even the slightest reform. There is a complete media blackout on systems such as those in Portugal, Australia, Japan, Singapore or Germany where a hybrid private/socialised system delivers better medical outcomes, lower costs for patients and infinitely less bureaucratic bullshit. But that would involve politicians from every party and the entirety of the media admitting they were wrong for the last 75 years so good fucking luck with that. And of course if people start to question whether a compulsory state-funded health service is a good idea, people start to ask awkward questions about the BBC's generous funding arrangements, so good luck getting the BBC to cover any of this properly. These threats were used by Labour for decades to make sure NHS staff dutifully voted Labour, something that became known as a part of Labour's "Client State" strategy - expand the public sector, then threaten people into voting for you by saying that the other lot will delete your job (the SNP have adopted this strategy very effectively in Scotland as well). As the largest single employer in all of Europe save the Russian military, with 1.6 million staff, this bought Labour a LOT of votes over the years.
Why the NHS is shit
Accident and Emergency (ER for 'muricans) is exciting and glamorous, and therefore is the only aspect of the NHS the media ever talk about. As budgets have become stretched, any attempt to cut back on A&E is met with screams of bloody murder from the media and interest groups. So the cuts go to less glamorous places instead. George Clooney never starred in an Emmy-winning drama about a diabetes clinic or a pain management clinic, so these services were quietly closed without a squeak from the usual suspects. But, denied the chance to manage their conditions, these patients would end up in A&E instead. It has got so bad that people are often told by their GPs to wait until their condition is bad enough to end up in hospital before seeing them again because there is no treatment or preventative medicine for them unless it's a total crisis. Of course it costs orders of magnitude more to treat these patients in A&E than in a local clinic, and in the meantime they get so sick they have to go on disability, impoverishing them and preventing them from paying any the taxes that fund the NHS. This media-driven, ass-backwards way of prioritising is fundamental to the way the NHS is run.
WARNING: You are entering a Joke Desert. Severe shortages of funny for several paragraphs. Stock up on chuckles before proceeding, you will fucking need them.
As a result, the NHS is only any good at treating acute (short-term) conditions. If you turn up with something that's bleeding or infected, you're probably going to get the treatment you need. But develop a chronic (long-term) problem, and you're probably fucked, because the NHS hasn't got a fucking clue what to do with you. The condition I'm being treated for privately right now is not rare, but in three years of trying to get the NHS to investigate my problems I got absolutely nowhere, got accused of making my symptoms up, and had a referral to the needed specialism over-ruled twice by my GP's boss without explanation, during which I became too sick to work full-time. Whilst my operation was funded by my insurance, much of my diagnostic work wasn't and I've had to pay thousands out of my own pocket to get to this stage. When I finally sat in front of the correct specialist consultant (a private doctor who had quit the NHS because they "wouldn't let him treat patients anymore"), he took one look at me and said "Jesus Christ, why didn't they send you to me years ago?" But we both knew the answer to that.
A friend of a friend was suffering from health problems that NHS doctors either failed to diagnose, or told him to his face that he was making up. He then went to medical school, qualified as a doctor, got a specialism, then gained the right to do private diagnostic tests on himself before diagnosing himself with his own condition. This entire process took a decade, and by the end of it the NHS had STILL not got past telling him that he had psychiatric problems rather than the serious bone disease he really had.
If you have a condition that the NHS cannot diagnose, particularly (but by no means exclusively) if you are female, the NHS will instead try to make you out to be a munchie, a pill-seeker or a malingerer. My best friend's cousin was suffering from explosive headaches and bizarre neurological symptoms including seizures, but because she tested negative for epilepsy, a diagnosis of Munchausen's Syndrome was placed on her record without her knowledge (and by a doctor who was not the qualified psychiatrist required to make such a diagnosis), and for years, every time she went to a GP she was either ignored or, on one memorable occasion, accused to her face of trying to get painkillers prescribed in order to sell them on to the local junkies. She scraped together every penny she had to get a private MRI scan, and lo and behold, twelve years after she first went to her GP about her headaches, it emerged she had a skull lining malformation that caused a bone spur to dig into her brain, and underwent emergency neurosurgery.
When she tried to get post-surgical painkillers, she was refused because Munchausen's Syndrome was STILL on her record and she had to make her own painkilers from imported Irish cough syrup and dark web tutorials. In a first world country.
The very worst area of the NHS is maternity and midwifery. The degree of neglect and negligence is astonishing. Another friend of mine had a particularly traumatic birth of her first child, and a few hours after the birth her stitches burst and blood started to gush out of her groin. She tried to summon doctors and nurses but was ignored. Her frantic husband went to the nursing station and refused to leave until he was seen, and instead of seeing what the problem was they threatened to have him arrested. By the time anyone checked on his wife, she had lost so much blood she was given a 50/50 chance of survival, fortunately fate was on her side that day.
Oh, and they wouldn't tell her what gender the baby was because the local Somalis were using that information to get backstreet abortions of little girls. In areas with large Muslim populations, it is now NHS policy to withold the sex of your own baby from you. But immigrants are the lifeblood of the country dontcha' know.
Another woman I once worked with told me how her daughter was born with her umbilical cord wrapped around her neck. It took so long for the NHS midwife to notice the problem and fix it that her now adult daughter suffered irreversibly brain damage and is now a drooling vegetable requiring 24 hour care and will never life anything like a proper life.
She was awarded £7000 ($9000) in compensation.
If you go into the Beauty Parlour, you will find VAST number of British "Munchies" and "Spoonies". Bearing the above in mind, how many of them do you think may actually genuinely have something wrong with them? Understand before you criticise. I genuinely believe for some of them that their weird behaviour is caused by a combination of undiagnosed and untreated neurological symptoms and the sanity-destroying effect of being told you are crazy every day when you are in genuine agony.
Oh yeah, let's talk about painkillers, and the body with the most Orwellian acronym in the country - the National Institute for Clinical Excellence - NICE. Nice is a "Quango", a peculiarly British kind of body that combines gigantic power with very little accountability. It is a set of bureaucrats appointed by politicians who have almost total power over some aspect of British life - equivalent perhaps to Federal Agencies in the US but much more secretive and unaccountable. NICE decides what NHS doctors are and aren't allowed to do, and in particular they determine what drugs or other treaments are allowed to be prescribed for which conditions.
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(I think this is their HQ)
NICE have reduced medicine to a series of flowcharts for diagnosis and treatment that NHS doctors have to follow or lose their careers, or even face criminal charges. If your symptoms don't quite match what's on the flowchart, you're not diagnosed. This is what happened to me - despite the latest medical literature clearly saying that my symptoms were not only not unheard of but also very common amongst people with my condition, it wasn't on the flowchart so no dice. The latest research enters a queue for NICE to pontificate over, which can take a decade and even then they'll probably fuck up. If they have an interest in medical research, as many do, your GP probably knows exactly what's wrong with you and what should be done about it, but is prevented by law from telling you or helping you. Britain's best doctors are quitting in droves in order to be able to actually treat patients, either in private practice or by going abroad.
In response to the media shrieking about the "Opioid Crisis" (which is only really a thing in the US), NICE decided last year that nobody without a formal diagnosis would get any painkillers any more. What with it often taking a decade or more (or often never, people go to their graves never knowing why they are sick and being told they are crazy until their condition kills them) for people with even relatively straightforward problems, this leaves hundreds of thousands of people with no legal way to deal with their pain and keep working. Worse, earlier this year, tens of thousands of chronically ill patients who DID have diagnoses had their painkiller prescriptions altered to between two thirds and half of what they were before. They were not told, nor did their GPs, for the most part, follow the required procedure for altering a patient's regular prescriptions, making it illegal. People only found out when they went to the pharmacy and only got a fraction of the pills they got the month before. You will find no mention of either scandal anywhere in the media because muh "envy of the world" and muh "opioid crisis".
It's not even a cost-saving exercise. Opioids are cheap as shit. Just the other day the BBC was crowing about how NICE had approved the use of a drug for a terminally-ill baby that cost £1.78m ($2.45m) a year. For a baby that was going to die. Yet that much money could pay for opioid painkillers for everyone who needs them, allowing them to work and pay way, way more than £1.78m in tax every year. Another example about how the NHS is ass-backwards and driven by media and politics, rather than by medicine or even money.
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"Yay, hundreds will die to give my tard baby another 3 months"
My old weed dealer from my London days told me that that, unlike a decade ago, more than half his clients are not the stereotypical thrill-seeking teenagers and wasted slackers, but working, professional people seeking a painkiller that will allow them to keep working, because good fucking luck getting disability if your medical records say you're a pill-seeker with nothing wrong with you, even if you are wracked by agony. Other dealers have quit selling weed and smack altogether to get into the UK's massive grey/black market for medicines. The government and Police keep smacking down online pill mills offering painkillers and sleeping tablets, but they spring up again, hydra-like, because there is overwhelming demand for their services - not from junkies, but from regular people in agony who don't fit into NICE's stupid fucking flowcharts.
If you are British, and you are unwell but undiagnosed, my advice is to learn about wild plants and how to get medicine out of them. Large numbers of people are now doing this, in much secrecy, amongst a media blackout and having to evade the Police while they do so. This is the state we are in now, we're building 200mph railway lines next to fields where our citizens are foraging for medicinal plants because the government won't allow doctors to treat them. There's no funny joke here. This is just Britain in 2021.
The way the NHS treats its patients is a walk in the park compared to how it treats its staff.
As a result of every single medical condition being funnelled into emergency medicine, hospital doctors are literally worked to death. If you are in A&E there's a very good chance that the doctor who sees you is a trainee who hasn't slept in four days and hasn't seen his supervisor in even longer. Legislation was recently passed to prevent hospital doctors working more than 100(!) hours a week. However, many such junior and trainee hospital doctors were promptly told by their managers (who work 36 hours a week for two or three times their salary) that if they didn't work 120 hours a week they wouldn't complete their placements and their careers would be over.
For the hard of math, there are only 168 hours in a week, and this 120 hours requirement doesn't include mealtimes, breaks or commuting. It's not clear whether this kills more doctors or more patients.
A nurse was forced to lift a 400 pound patient on her own into emergency surgery because he was flatlining and there were no hospital porters available. She fractured her spine in the process, was paralysed from the waist down and was bedbound for six months. When, still in a wheelchair, she attended her "return to work" meeting, she was confronted by seven NHS managers and HR drones. These people had prepared a presentation for her, estimating the number of patients they thought had died due to her six month "unauthorised" absence from work, and sacked her on the spot. Each and every one of those people earned at least three or four times what the missing hospital porters would have been paid to be on duty the night her employers put her in a wheelchair for life.
If a doctor has the temerity to quit all this madness and go into private practice, the NHS persecutes them and tries anything it can to strip them of their loicences to practice, in the guise of the General Medical Council. One doctor was hauled up in front of the GMC for "practicing midwifery" without the correct loicence by assisting in a birth at her neighbour's property - even though the patient in question was a Devonshire Saddleback Pig.
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(It probably voted Tory too, the LITERAL SWINE)
Of course, when an NHS doctor fucks up and kills someone, it's swept under the carpet.
I could tell you more. I could tell you about Stafford Hospital, where it was estimated that between 500 and 2000 people died from medical negligence in just three years from 2005-2008 (from a hospital serving a town of just 68,000 people) and it barely made the papers. If that many people had died on the entire country's railways in that time there would have been literal rioting in the streets (well, more rioting than usual), but because it was the NHS and because there was no smoking wreckage, nobody cared. A handful of people whose loved ones died finally got compensation of about $13,000 each after a decade-long battle. I could talk about how the NHS harboured the world's most prolific serial killer in Harold Shipman, protecting him while he killed anything up to 500 of his patients. I could talk about how David Cameron even used his own dead son to deflect accusations that he might reform the NHS. But I'm too depressed to continue even for a Brit.
Apologies for the relative lack of jokes in this one. It's very hard to make this situation funny, even when your sense of humour is so dark the Police kneel on its neck.
I can't breathe, indeed.
