The State Is Not Your Friend
Yet again, the Wonder of the World shows its true nature:
Another patient is Jack Hose, 71, from Bournemouth, whose entitlement to health service care was withdrawn by the Royal Bournemouth and Christchurch Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust because he chose to pay for a drug that is not normally funded by the state. Hose has been billed by the trust for £11,500.
Hose said: “It seems outrageous that, having paid national insurance contributions for 50 years, they are now asking me to pay for my care.”
That true nature, of course, being health care rationing at the convenience of the state. If you're inconvenient, you can get stuffed. Jack Hose managed to get what he paid for eventually when his NHS Trust was shamed into treating him, just when the 71 year old Mr Hose was about to write the NHS a cheque for £11,500 too, I'm sure. If only Linda O'Boyle could say the same:
When Mrs O'Boyle, who had three children and four grandchildren, developed bowel cancer and began having chemotherapy, doctors said she could boost her chances of fighting the disease by adding the drug cetuximab.
It is not routinely funded by the NHS but she decided to use her savings to pay for it.Southend University Hospital NHS Foundation Trust then withdrew her free treatment, including the chemotherapy drug she was receiving.
Mrs O'Boyle isn't available for comment right now. She's dead. As always, I sincerely hope the O'Boyle family makes it personal against those ministers and officials who sentenced their wife and mother to death. I can't say what I think about these heartless, snivelling bastards and keep it civil, so I'll just link to the Devil, who speaks for me.
Pete Moore
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Reading the link to the ToL, it appears that it isn't so much the Trusts who are to blame, but the politicians who made the rules in the first place.
"A spokeswoman for Gloucestershire Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, which has withdrawn state-funded treatment from Eckley, said: “While we sympathise with Mr Eckley’s situation, we are bound by [government] guidelines.”
Not that the excuses of the various Trusts are worth much, - but they do seem to have a plentiful supply of crocodile tears!...
Ernest -
Government guidelines are not law (and even if they were, such laws deserve to be broken). Sure, there are penalties to pay for not following 'guidelines' when you work for a state monopoly, and these are usually to your career or budget. But on the other hand, you can do the morally right thing and treat ill people. All in all, it shows how low we've sunk that we employ such vermin in the NHS.
Pete,
Hence the 'crocodile tears sentence...
A society of 'jobsworth's', unable to accept responsibility, but happy to take the cash..
There are many good people working in the NHS, but as ever, led by poor managers,
Why is poor management and poor leadership such a feature of the British way of life? we seem to survive not because of them, but in spite of them.
DK consistently articulates the scale of my anger at the shower of Nu_Labour sh**s who ru(i)n this country, better than I ever could.
Death by cockroach to them all.
Health services, private insurance, drugs companies are not your friend either Pete.
Not that they have this issue in France though where cancer rates under their PUBLIC system continue to go down and access is available to ALL. Of course you can tell me people don't die through lack of access in the US, or unscrupulous insurance companies under their wonder system and you would be wrong.
My mum's friend DIED after the private fund she had paid into refused her the treatement she was OWED and to date have not REFUNDED the tens of thousand she paid into that PRIVATE account either.
So what's the answer?
At the bottom of this could it be the drugs companes extortionate and criminal charges for their wonder drugs perchance??
Apologies for the use of CAPS but whilst I understand that righteous anger in these situations, we still do not seem to get a balanced, fully honest and forthright debate going on HEALTHCARE here on ATW.