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Government Healthcare for Less!
Problem: There is not enough dollars or resources to give everyone all the medical care they might want.
Solution: Only serve the people you like! England’s NHS has decided they will not give medical care to anyone who is racist or sexist. “From April, under new rules NHS services will be able to bar anyone inflicting discriminatory or harassing behaviour on staff from non-emergency care.”
Genius! Now they can only treat people who they judge are not being discriminatory. Budget crisis averted!
Published in General
OUT: Using price to determine the allocation of scarce resources.
IN: Using thoughcrimes to determine the allocation of scarce resources.
Pretty soon they’ll be pulling up Britons’ social media histories along with their medical histories.
Gee, what could possibly go wrong with this plan?
Not quite. Social media will be the gateway – only once you are first confirmed to be One of the Approved Few will anyone even bother to consider offering medical services.
This is merely codifying what has been practice for years. Several times over the last dozen or so years, I have been absolutely gobsmacked how very little it takes to cause NHS staff from any sort of service (doctors, nurses, social workers, psychiatric workers, physical therapists, and so on), to pick up their football and go home, claiming “harassment” or “abuse” or discriminatory behavior, or anything else that might have hurt their little fee-fees and made them uncomfortable. And when your healthcare is provided by the government, and the government up-sticks and leaves you on your own, there’s nobody else who’ll come.
In every case, they were dealing with an old person (and, in my family, which regularly lives into its 90s, if not its 100s, I do mean “old”) whose command of language was failing, who was decrepit, weak, in pain or confused, and who wasn’t at what, at the height of their mental and physical powers, we might have called their “best.”
So shouting at the physical therapist who was trying to get them to perform difficult and painful exercises, or swearing at the nurse who couldn’t find the vein, or (yes, Auntie Betty, I’m looking at you) making rather nasty comments about a caregiver’s race (which I know you’d have choked on, rather than said them out loud a couple of decades earlier), all caused the “carer” to leave in a huff.
I’m not advocating a free-for-all, or that we should exempt our much-loved elders from any expectation of good manners as they age. But, Good Lord. Do these people not have any elderly people in their own families? Are they not taught about the loss of inhibition and control among those who reach a great age? Really?
(To be clear, I’m not talking about uncontrollable rage and physically abusive behavior by any of my relatives. I’m talking about the sort of “bad” and sometimes “embarrassing” behavior that’s quite common among the aged, behavior which the snowflakes in the NHS apparently think they themselves will be exempt from in their declining years, and find it intolerable to be around.)
I confess that I find myself, in my less-charming moments, wishing these people a difficult and lonely old age, with few, if any, willing to care for them.
I am sure that there are some instances of real harassment and abuse of NHS workers, and that those should be swiftly dealt with, but I think they need to get some perspective on their jobs, their duties, and their customer base. When one’s job is largely to work with the sick, the infirm, and the elderly, one might have to adjust your expectations a bit.
It has been claimed that women who prefer female doctors or men who prefer male and anyone who prefers a doctor who speaks English comprehensibly or shows preference for a graduate from a first world medical school is therefore a sexist or racist. Call me both, because at the most intimate time of life–during illness or invasive examination–I want someone I can understand and who understands me and with whom I feel physically comfortable. Generally speaking, that’s an English speaking woman if it’s an intimate exam. For orthopedics, eye exams, and similar my docs are often men. The best ones I can find. All are primary English speakers. This is not an unreasonable requirement. Nonetheless, this hasn’t stopped doctors from claiming to be victims of racism. Yup, everyone is a victim, even the most privileged. And, yes, the next step is labeling the patient for his or her thought crime. Interesting the next step after that is rationing of care. Pretty damned scary.
Would they like to address this sort of thing? Think she’s unique? Perhaps in getting caught…
And because everyone has at least one beef with the opposite sex or other races, no one will be served. Super way to cut costs!
On the most recent London Calling podcast, they discussed whether care for the daughter of one of the hosts had been delayed because he exhibited politically incorrect thoughts about a Chinese person who had recently been to China. And the other host believed that the government is using the NHS to construct child abuse charges against people the government doesn’t like (by chalking up every injury or harm that comes to a child as evidence that the parent is beating the child).
A government-run medical care system can affect a lot of aspects of life beyond medical care.
Star Trek, Voyager, Season 7, Episode 5. Centralized system decides who gets which drugs, and does so against the equal-to-all ideal of the Federation, which comes in and shuts it down.
They did help themselves to Voyagers’ holo-doctor, in a plot that somehow decides the doctor’s underlying software can only exist in one place at a time. Because copying bits is too advanced for mere star travelers.
Well, they already murder children. Next they will murder adults.
So sayeth the Death Panel
I am confused. I thought “racism” was symptomatic of mental illness like “climate denialism” or libertarian economics. Who makes the call as to whether “get your hands off me, you Paki bastard” is an unwitting desperate cry for help, a mental state caused by trauma or disease or just conscious obnoxiousness? What if the patient is polite and compliant but covered with swastika tattoos? Does the right to reject depend on whether a minority staff member declares him or herself offended or can a white staffer make the call based on an inference of such offense? I see lots of memos, handbooks, and seminars on the way.
This seems to point to one of two implications:
a) that despite the Left’s frequent claims to the contrary, healthcare is not a human right after all, or
b) that people deemed to be racist/sexist/etc. are not human.
Now, I’m a simple guy so I probably don’t get all the “nuances” of that second implication, and I hate to throw around overused and misused words willy-nilly, but that seems like a somewhat fascist position to take, doesn’t it?
Nah. When in doubt, turn ’em away.
What a perfect summation. Thank you.
If you start turning away offensive, stupid people, then ER traffic could drop about 60%.