British Healthcare System To Bar Smokers And Overweight People From Getting Surgery Because The NHS Is Out Of Money

Just in case it wasn’t ABUNDANTLY CLEAR that the UK’s National Health Service absolutely blows chunks…

I know, y’all are probably tired of hearing about how bad government-run healthcare is in Britain. Trust me, I’m tired of harping on it. Mostly because the story lately has been about the crap sandwich the NHS has been force-feeding little Charlie Gard and his parents over the last few months. It’s bad enough when this kind of garbage gets foisted onto adults. But this is a BABY they’re talking about.

But there is another side of this government-run nightmare that is ongoing. Suffice it to say that Charlie Gard isn’t the only victim of the god-king-emperor healthcare system in the UK.

According to this, the NHS is considering (and might have already implemented this) barring people who smoke and who are overweight from getting access to hip and knee surgeries. Because – and this is going to come as a TOTAL AND COMPLETELY SHOCK – the NHS is running out of money –

A subsidiary of the government-run British National Health Service has decided to bar obese patients and smokers from undgergoing hip and knee operations. “I think we are going to see more and more decisions like this,” said Chris Hopson, the head of NHS Providers told The Telegraph. “It’s the only way providers are going to be able to balance their books.”

Hm… the government puts itself in charge of providing healthcare to every one of its citizens, but when they don’t have the money to do it anymore, they start picking who gets the healthcare they promised. Oh man… there is a phrase for that… it’s on the tip of my tongue… the Democrats made fun of Republicans for using it back in 2010… whatever could it have been…

It couldn’t be death panels, would it? Nah… they said that NEVER happens under single-payer systems! EVER!

Gee, maybe the NHS should have considered that when Chris Gard and Connie Yates were saying they had the money to pay for their son’s medical treatments in the United States. Might have saved a big chunk of change right there.

True, you probably won’t die from not having a hip or knee replaced. But eventually that’s going to cause you even more health problems down the road. And if they ban these surgeries now, what’s stopping them from saying you don’t need other more life-saving operations later?

They did it once, they can do it again.

Oh, and my “favorite” part of this article? That the columnist actually compares the UK’s NHS to our VA health system, calling the two “cousins” –

The British NHS and the U.S. VA are cousins
The British National Health Service and the U.S. Veterans Health Administration are two of the last remaining socialized health care systems in the world. That is to say, both systems have not only single-payer, government-run health insurance—the government also owns the hospitals and employs the doctors.
When government has that dominant of a role, it has no choice but to prioritize how to spend the money. In May, NHS England disclosed that its health care providers—hospitals, clinics, doctors and the like—had spent £2.45 billion ($3.26 billion) more than they had been allocated.

There’s even a list of problems plaguing the NHS that the author says are eerily similar to the issues people have run into with the VA –

The NHS has, for decades, endured problems that will remind many of the VA’s waiting list scandal:

• NHS doctors routinely conceal from patients information about innovative new therapies that the NHS doesn’t pay for, so as to not “distress, upset or confuse” them.
• Terminally ill patients are incorrectly classified as “close to death” so as to allow the withdrawal of expensive life support.
• NHS expert guidelines on the management of high cholesterol are intentionally out of date, putting patients at serious risk, in order to save money.
• When the government approved an innovative new treatment for elderly blindness, the NHS initially decided to reimburse for the treatment only after patients were already blind in one eye — using the logic that a person blind in one eye can still see, and is therefore not that badly off.
• While most NHS patients expect to wait five months for a hip operation or knee surgery, leaving them immobile and disabled in the meantime, the actual waiting times are even worse: 11 months for hips and 12 months for knees. (This compares to a wait of 3 to 4 weeks for such procedures in the United States.)
• One in four Britons with cancer is denied treatment with the latest drugs proven to extend life.
• Those who seek to pay for such drugs on their own are expelled from the NHS system, for making the government look bad, and are forced to pay for the entirety of their own care for the rest of their lives.
• Britons diagnosed with cancer or heart attacks are more likely to die, and more quickly, than those of most other developed nations. Britain’s survival rates for these diseases are “little better than [those] of former Communist countries.”

That last one is what really gets me. A developed country like Great Britain, a country that shaped and defined much of our history and Western civilization as a whole – even that country can only devise a government healthcare system comparable to countries who spent the better part of the 20th century slogging through communist regimes and barel surviving. That’s where Britain is right now.

That’s just sad. Let’s not send American healthcare down the same path, mmmkay?