National Health Service

Somebody in the States asked what I thought about the National Health Service here in the UK. I’ve been meaning to write something about the NHS for a while now, and this is a good excuse. First of all, it’s not completely free. Everybody in work pays a specific tax for the NHS much the same as the Social Security tax in the US. I think this money just goes into the Treasury like all the other taxes and then the Government doles out the money to fund all the various parts of the healthcare system.

From there on it’s free to the users who are all the people who live here legally. This means that when we need to see the family doctor, called General Practitioners or more commonly GPs, there are no bills to pay. The GPs are organized into small groups called surgeries that contract with the NHS to provide services in their area. For example, our surgery has seven or eight doctors and the associated staff of nurses and clerical people. Most of the time we can make an appointment with the same doctor each time, however, in an emergency, we have to take whichever doctor is available.

The GPs are the gatekeepers for the rest of the system providing prescriptions, arranging for hospital treatment and so forth.  A couple of years ago I needed an operation on my right hand. It was arranged that I would have the procedure at the hospital in nearby Hereford. Our small, local hospital doesn’t have the facilities for surgery. Anyway, during the pre-operation tests they found out that I had a minor heart problem that needed to be fixed before the operation could be done. My GP was the one who took charge of all this. The short version is that the heart issue was sorted out and the operation was a success. Then I had to have a series of work sessions with physiotherapists at both the Hereford and Leominster hospitals. The only thing I had to pay for was the parking at the Hereford hospital; parking in Leominster is free.

If you’re old like we are (over sixty) all your prescriptions are free as well. This also applies to people who receive certain social benefits. If you don’t qualify for free prescriptions, you pay a fixed price for each prescription regardless of the drug being prescribed. We just take the GP’s prescription to the pharmacy and it’s free. I have three renewable prescriptions that I renew on surgery’s web site. It gets passed automatically to my nominated pharmacy and two days later it’s there.

The dental services work a little like prescriptions except they’re not free for elders. There is a fixed list of prices for various dental procedures that are much lower than the private sector. I even get my glasses paid for by the NHS.

Right now the new Conservative led British government is trying to reorganize the NHS and reduce its cost. Budgets are being cut, but the reorganization plans have had to be diluted after serious public and media objections.

What do I think about the NHS? I think it’s great! Sometimes it’s a little slow and bureaucratic, but, hey, I’ll put up with some small inconvenience for all this free service. There are other ways to provide social medicine; the more common way in continental Europe is to build the system on subsidized, one-source health insurance run or supervised by the government. These plans provide excellent healthcare as well. If I were living in the US, I would be campaigning for some kind of social medicine. It’s hard for me to justify an advanced country whose citizens don’t receive these benefits.