ZDaemon

[Sniper]

So after receiving a text message earlier saying that my grandma had fallen and broken the 2 bones in her forearm, bearing in mind she is 74 years old. To find out that she arrived at the hospital at 1:10pm and didnt get seen until 8:45pm. This is just disgusting in my eyes, it really is.
What the hell is happening here?

I know the Hospital / NHS service hasn't been good for a long time, but i thought we were talking about 2 - 3 hour waits, not over 7 hours.

[Thadeuss]

I hope she's alright mate, scary thing is that even with the NHS being a shadow of its former self, its still free health care. You hear stories like this all the time, but sometimes I think it's just your luck.

[JKist3]

Nationalized healthcare... what do you expect

[MetalBlack]

Yeah, what Thad said, FREE. You think you have it bad, how about my mother having to pay $20,000 for having to stay a few days in the hospital after a stroke. come on man, some people have it alot worse then you guys.

[JKist3]

I'd rather have the option of paying 20 grand and getting attention when I need it instead of having to wait. If it's life threatening, I don't wanna take my chances to save 20k. Also it's not free, you pay for it with taxes, and because that still isnt enough to finance good healthcare you get a shitty system like sniper is complaining about.

[Kitty]

Its the same here. I broke my leg when I was 11 and waited 5 hours to be seen. Waited the same amount of time at the childrens hospital when I sprained my ankle the day after I got my cast off.
Free healthcare isn't as great as people think it is.

[Serp_i_Molot]

[Thadeuss]

[theDooMguy]

[Englander]

Welcome to Labour's new Britain Sniper, don't fucking get me started! My mates wife knows this 14 year old girl who got sexually abused by her dad for 4 years, she finally admitted it was happening, mates wife call the police, after some investigation, the father said "didn't do nothing" and the police charge the girl for wasting their time, which 2 weeks later he finally admitted to it, didn't get charged with shit though.

Turns out he was in the polices pocket, local grass for the area.

[Mr-cheater]

Let's say that there was this guy.... and he lives in Canada, (Free Health Care)he lives with a poor family. The problem is that he has body problems like Asthma attacks, since he lives with a poor family it's hard for him to get his "puffer" he gets a lot of attacks since he's poor again when he goes to the hospital, he's glad that it's free and doesn't have to pay up front. So if you were this person, would you be glad for a free health care?

[Shakal]

Nationalized healthcare isn't bad. I remember when I broke my arm here I only had to wait 5 minutes to get treatment, naturally I wasn't charged anything.

Around here the big complaint is the waiting lists for MRIs. I imagine it would be easier to simply privatize that sector. Aside from that though it seems to be fine.

[Kitty]

[SuperNova]

For everyone saying that free healthcare is bad and going on about hospital's being under-staffed, ect. Allow me to clarify a few things for you:

1. Work or do volunteer work in a hospital and you'll quickly learn that every hospital is understaffed. I've both worked with and witnessed events such as yours, sniper, and rest assured that the HealthCare system--whether government or privatized or not--has pretty much nothing to do with it actually.

As most people struggle to grasp concepts right away, I'll give you the pleasure of what everyone loves: EXAMPLES!

When I did my clinical time in St. Vincents Hospital back in the winter, there was a patient in the E.R waiting room with a collapsed long, Sp2 stats reading 89%, Respiratory Rate of 22 Breaths Per Minute and going in and out of consciousness (Basically, they were ready to stop breathing on their own). That patient arrived at the same time I did to begin my clinicals and wasn't admitted until the time I left, which was 5 and a half hours later.

Another example, which believe me it hits right at home, is with my son. Back in December, he had a mass growing on his kidney (didn't know it at the time) and when we took him in that day, he was described to have "extreme difficulty breathing." This large mass was compressing against his diaphragm making it hard for him to breath. Okay, the kid was a month old and we were admitted, but we sat in an E.R Room for 4 hours before anyone came to do any examinations. We were later to find out that this was actually a benign tumor known as Mesoblast Nemphorma, which can be cancerous but in most cases isn't and typically begins on a kidney or renal artery.

This also caused him to go into early stages of heart failure and eventually, if not treated, he would have died from cardiac arrest. However, once he was moved up into the Pediatric Intensive Care Unit; I couldn't have asked for better treatment.

That being said though, I suspect that the reason why he was paid so much attention to was because of the circumstances. This type of tumor is rarely discovered in children his age and on top of that, after he was born, they did their scans and nothing was found. So for something this massive to grow that quick, it drew interest and some of the BEST doctors and surgeons in the world were checking him out and looking through his file as well as my past history and my wifes.

I am happy to say that he is fine now. After a week, he was taken into surgery and his tumor and right kidney were removed. His heart function is completely normal now and he's just your average six month old kid--with one kidney, of course. The most ironic part of this all though, folks--he's on Medicare.

So here it is in a nutshell. After reading all of the posts, I've found one complaint to be common in all of those who claim to be against the idea of national healthcare. All of your experiences were in an E.R setting. Welp, guess what: E.R'S SUCK. They're disorganized, they get slammed and whether the government or private insurance is paying for it won't change whether 20 people or just 2 will be getting into horrible car accidents that night.

You can't overstaff or understaff for that. Every event is different and money won't change that, sad to say. It's the business of saving peoples' lives. Hospitals make their money off of clinical trials and clinical patients, because they're just checking up on them and using no M.R.I machines, no X-Rays, no C.T Scans, no C.A.T scans, no expensive equipment at all. The patient talks to the doctor and and the bill is sent to insurance companies or government, which most check-up bills here are about 500-700 dollars, depending on where you live.

And look at it this way: it's a well-known fact that a good portion of the people in the U.S do not have healthcare coverage. So they go to hospitals with problems, end up owing thousands and thousands of dollars and will never pay it back because they simply can not afford it. At that point hospitals are paying for patients, not being paid for taking care of them. I would think they're losing more money that way than they would be by going to a Nationalized HealthCare system. And put it like this, when have you ever heard of a hospital NOT being in debt? I can assure you with the utmost confidence that such a hospital does not exist.

And I'll end it like this. I was paying taxes out of the asshole when the Bush Administration was in Office. Now that things have change, and tax cuts have gone back to where they should be, I'm seeing close to $100 dollars a check that I wasn't seeing back then due to tax cuts for me. However, I would gladly go back to paying those taxes if I knew my healthcare would be provided for and I could simply walk into a hospital and worry about my injury/illness, not how I'm going to pay for it.

[Mr-cheater]

[MetalBlack]

I just cant see how people are complaining about free healthcare, it boggles my mind. Try being in other peoples shoes who dont have all the luxuries you have. My buddy dislocated his knee at our work and he still had to wait 2 hours at the hospital before being treated so I would honestly stop whining about you having to wait on FREE healthcare. If we had free healthcare, and I broke and arm or a leg, It would honestly ease my mind knowing that this is a free visit for me and I am not going to have to pay out the ass for it, so I wouldnt mind waiting a few hours in pain, so I dont see why you guys cant be grateful and do the same.

[Kitty]

[Czar]

she broke 2 bones in her arm. its not life threatening. thus you were made to wait that long. i dont think it would be that long if she, god forbid, had something life threatening.

[Thadeuss]

The most shocking thing about this whole thread is that Hatred is a father.

[SuperNova]