I got my MRI in a matter of days, not because my case was dire (it was just a routine screening) but because I paid for private health care through my employer.
We need to have a grown up conversation in this country about how fucked up it is that private companies have injected themselves into our “single payer” system to create two-tiered care.
You cannot share this space with private companies. The only mode capitalism has is stratification and enshittification.
I actually don’t mind it too much in theory, private healthcare works better in the uk because 1. Anyone who uses it also pays for nhs cover anyway, so they’re paying in but not using the resources, saving money for everyone else.
And 2. Private healthcare stays out of the emergency room, this is where duplicate effort is an enormous waste since you need them all over the country, having an emergency room not everyone can go to is just insane.
That said, i guess the danger is anyone who does pay private has an incentive to push back against the nhs, maybe that’s ruining things, though I bet they’d be doing it even harder if they were forced to lie next to poor people in the hospital, so I’m not sure we can avoid that
I used to agree with this until i got private healthcare through my employer. My wife had been waiting 6 months for a referral and had been cancelled twice.
Once we got on the private healthcare figured we might as well use it. Had an appointment 3 days later with the same Dr who had cancelled her twice.
It’s not saving resources for the nhs, it’s extracting them. For all we know, she got cancelled because someone paying privately booked an appointment so got priority.
It goes to show how much we assume that there are infinite resources, as long as we can pay for them. But there are actual real limitations to manpower, equipment and natural resources. There is a massive difference between the whole pie getting bigger, and one person’s share of it getting bigger.
I got my MRI in a matter of days, not because my case was dire (it was just a routine screening) but because I paid for private health care through my employer.
We need to have a grown up conversation in this country about how fucked up it is that private companies have injected themselves into our “single payer” system to create two-tiered care.
You cannot share this space with private companies. The only mode capitalism has is stratification and enshittification.
I actually don’t mind it too much in theory, private healthcare works better in the uk because 1. Anyone who uses it also pays for nhs cover anyway, so they’re paying in but not using the resources, saving money for everyone else. And 2. Private healthcare stays out of the emergency room, this is where duplicate effort is an enormous waste since you need them all over the country, having an emergency room not everyone can go to is just insane.
That said, i guess the danger is anyone who does pay private has an incentive to push back against the nhs, maybe that’s ruining things, though I bet they’d be doing it even harder if they were forced to lie next to poor people in the hospital, so I’m not sure we can avoid that
I used to agree with this until i got private healthcare through my employer. My wife had been waiting 6 months for a referral and had been cancelled twice.
Once we got on the private healthcare figured we might as well use it. Had an appointment 3 days later with the same Dr who had cancelled her twice.
It’s not saving resources for the nhs, it’s extracting them. For all we know, she got cancelled because someone paying privately booked an appointment so got priority.
It goes to show how much we assume that there are infinite resources, as long as we can pay for them. But there are actual real limitations to manpower, equipment and natural resources. There is a massive difference between the whole pie getting bigger, and one person’s share of it getting bigger.