In Defense of the NHS: I'm Glad I Didn't Break My Leg in the U.S. (Guardian UK)

[Lydia Leftcoast]

(The author is telling what happened after he fell off a ladder while attempting to paint his house and shattered his leg.)

In the agonising hour that followed before our next-door neighbour arrived home and found me whimpering piteously for help, left leg utterly unresponsive, I had time to think of many things – including how stupid I'd been – but never the implications of my future treatment. This was Britain, after all. I would, without question, query or censure, be treated by the NHS at no cost to myself.

Not so, perhaps, had I bounced off the front of my parents-in-law's house in Houston, Texas. They are in their early 80s, expatriates from Britain for more than 50 years, and have followed my medical care with what I now realise is more than solicitous interest, thanks to the vitriolic US healthcare debate of recent weeks and the slagging-off that British medicine has received as a result (why do Americans always home in on the state of our teeth?)...

...I have so far spent three weeks in hospital, had four operations under general anaesthetic, daily home visits from district nurses and face weeks, if not months, of more care. Yet I have never been asked for my credit card or insurance documents before treatment, as I was the only time I fell ill while visiting the in-laws in the US. No one has murmured that this treatment or that service might be a little on the expensive side, or will incur a delay. And no one – despite what conservative Republicans allege – has yet questioned whether my life is still worth living, or whether amputation would be cheaper.

I can't tell what my treatment has cost the NHS, but I have some idea what it might have been in the US thanks to the in-laws' doctor, who gave an estimate based on prices in Houston. The figures are eye-watering. She reckons: $12,000 per operation; up to $3,500 for anaesthetics each time; hospital at $500 a day and ambulance $300 a trip. That's not counting the cost of medicine. It adds up to more than $76,000, or at least £47,000. We'd have had to sell the house I was so rashly attempting to paint.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2009/aug/19/nhs-healthcare-america

[lsewpershad]

1. K&R

Every American should read this.

[ms liberty]

2. Off to the Greatest...K&R n/t

[TankLV]

3. Umm - the cost figures are WAY off - a single DAY in the hospital costs $3,000 not $500!!!

and that is the TYPICAL cost, some are much HIGHER!

Nowhere is a single day LESS than a couple THOUSAND...

[lib_wit_it]

4. Why should I listen to some "socialized" foreigner? Surely he is brainwashed by his Anti-American

overlords. He probably just *thinks* his broken leg has been treated, but in fact he's been sedated and is about to stand before a Totalitarian Nazi Marxist Communist Socialist Proustian Existential Dadaist Death Panel that the secretly still-living Vlad the Impaler heads. No doubt it's (iron) curtains for him and his irresponsibly injured leg!