Mountain of Broke-Back
It's no
surprise to me that the Competition Commission has charged UK private hospital
chains, HCA, Spire, BMI, Nuffield and Ramsay with
operating a monopoly and charging patients over and above the cost of the
services they provide by £200m. A forced sell-off of some 20 hospitals now
looks likely.
Unlike our European neighbours we
pay extortionate prices for private health care here and that includes
dentistry and eye care and with treatment like hip replacements deemed
'elective' for what is a very painful and degenerative condition, it's small wonder
people are persuaded to fly to e.g. France and get the surgery done there for a
fraction of the UK private price tag.
It's cheaper, for example, to drive
to an airport, park, fly to Spain for the day (Ryanair or easyJet obviously) get blood tests and a mammogram done in a private clinic and fly home again in time for supper, than it is to drive up the road to your
nearest private hospital. I know because I've done both.
A current price for just the mammogram, as advertised online by London clinic Pall Mall Medical is
£320.
*****
A couple of weeks ago, on the sun-drenched island of Malta, while we were equally
sun-drenched but beset by our boxer dog Cally having slipped a disc in her
back... my Darling Mother fell and fractured two of her vertebrae: one
crushed, one chipped.
She was able to pay a nominal sum to see a General Practitioner who, as a matter of routine, visited her at home, gave her painkillers, prescribed rest.
When after a few
days the pain became much worse, she was able to make an appointment to go, not
to Accident & Emergency, but to see an orthopaedic consultant who
specialises in back injuries.
The inclusive cost of the consultation and the X-ray which followed immediately (and which she was able to keep) and the medical corset she has to wear: £225. Cost of medication, painkillers: £81.
Cost of the whole saga to date with a follow up visit to the consultant: £425. What would that have cost privately in the UK, I wonder?
*****
I suspect one of the reasons so many
people keep turning up at A & E is to bypass the GPs who, if you have a precarious and or demanding full-time job and a difficult
boss are well nigh impossible to get an appointment with and who seem to act as nightclub
bouncers on behalf of the NHS, jealously guarding the hospital doors; maintaining
the perimeter defences to deny the 'walking well,' as we have been dubbed, access
to those twin modern deities, consultants and their hi-tech wizard machines.
Presumably the nation is watching more Holby City and Casualty than
is strictly good for it.
Both of these [BBC] hospital
soaps make great play of the modern hospital's sophisticated hardware and
technical resources. No telly nurse or junior doctor is without their ipad
nowadays and, if the BBC is to be
believed you have only to show up in Holby City's AAU ( that's Acute Assessment
Unit for you amateurs out there) with a cut on your elbow and a stain on your
lip to have the entire arsenal unleashed upon you.
Yes. If you went to the GP in that condition he would probably tell you
to wash your face and get a life; if you went to Holby City they would order an ultrasound, IV fluids, blood tests, urine sample, CAT scan, MRI scan and diagnose you
with Diverticulitis.
In France, Italy, Spain and
Germany it's quite standard for people to voluntarily undergo routine 'MOT' (Ministry of Transport) testing in the same way that we perform MOT tests on cars – it's
all about roadworthiness.
But here there is a deeply ingrained suspicion that screening the 'well'
will turn us into a nation of hypochondriacs and fuss-pots.
That kind
of cultural snobbery would be well and good if stiff -upper lip bravura and
stoicism and preferring to talk openly and in detail about our weather as opposed to our bowel
movements, was making us any healthier but it isn't.
In the Health League Tables published by medical journal The Lancet in March of this year, those fuss-pots and hypochondriacs in Spain and
France and Germany and Greece and Ireland, scored far higher than us. We came
12th out of an international table of 19.
Aunty BBC demonstrated the statistics in her live health check programme, Long Live Britain, in which the largest ever snapshot screening of the nation's health was taken in a single day: 79 per cent of the 384 adults screened were referred immediately to their GP because they were considered 'at an increased risk of developing' either Type 2 Diabetes, alcohol-related liver disease or cardiovascular disease.
Access to cheap private medicine might encourage swathes of the British population to look after themselves better. After all, according to yet another BBC programme, The Call Centre, people seem quite happy to spend a fortune on Botox and teeth whitening and plastic surgery and cosmetics and spray-on tans....
...And large flat screen televisions and crisps and nuts to nibble and lots of red wine to swig while beached on the sofa like fat whales mired in their own moral stupor rendered utterly inert by too many hours spent watching programmes like Long Live Britain and Casualty
and Holby City and The Call Centre. Ooops!
03.09.2013
Seen On Stockbridge Down This Summer
Small White - Pieris Rapae |
A Red-tailed bumble bee, Bombus Lapidarius; I guess it's a worker bee not a Queen; the males apparently have yellow facial hairs and a yellow band on the thorax. |
A Fritillary - I think this is the Pearl-Bordered Fritillary but I'm very happy to be put right! |

But, I Am Not A Mote |
![]() |
I Love the M3 |
Fantasy Pub Landlady |
![]() |
High Vizzers |
No comments:
Post a Comment