Another exciting chapter in British socialized medicine: people pulling their own teeth because the National Health Service is such a miserable failure.
Some English people have resorted to pulling out their own teeth because they cannot find -- or cannot afford -- a dentist, a major study has revealed.Six percent of those questioned in a survey of 5,000 patients admitted they had resorted to self-treatment using pliers and glue, the UK's Press Association reported. ...
One respondent in Lancashire, northern England, claimed to have extracted 14 of their own teeth with a pair of pliers. In Liverpool, one of those collecting data for the survey interviewed three people who had pulled out their own teeth in one morning.
"I took most of my teeth out in the shed with pliers. I have one to go," another respondent wrote.
Others said they had fixed broken crowns using glue to avoid costly dental work.
Valerie Halsworth, 64, told British television's GMTV she had removed seven of her own teeth using her husband's pliers when her toothache became unbearable and she was unable to find an NHS dentist willing to treat her.
Halsworth admitted that the first extraction had been "excruciatingly painful." But she added: "It got that painful that I just had to do something... When you have taken a tooth out... the pain has gone."
I trust the American people aren't naive enough to follow suit....
Have you seen this article? In the US, we have what is basically a dentists' union actually legislating who can be treated.
mpayne, thats more of a union problem than just a dentist problem. Its what unions do, they are even worse when they are public employee unions.
Dentistry is about the weakest component of the British NHS. The trick is to visit your NHS dentist every 6 months, then he can't kick you off his books.
It shouldn't be like that. But as a Brit, it's obvious to me that this isn't a problem with the NHS as a concept, but with the particular implementation of it around dentists. If the concept itself was so bad, it'd be the same in other areas of medicine; it isn't.
mpayne: The source of the problem is very near the top of the article:
The dentist cartel uses government power to protect its business from competition, apparently.
jez: At least you folks have the option to go to private doctors, right? Canadians don't even have that. Perhaps that modicum of competition helps a bit.
I don't see how that competition affects the NHS. Its revenue stream is guaranteed.
Except it isn't, the stream to a given trust depends on its being on budget, the results of inspections and various statistics eg. average / maximum waiting times.
I've used both, and my own experience and observations from my friends indicates that, if you don't mind waiting for anything non-urgent, NHS quality is at least as high as private.
Jez--that's great. And when you factor in wait times?
Usually a wait for a non-urgent procedure is no hardship at all. (If it was, then it could be called "urgent").
There are ethical problems with all-private health care. In such a system, if a doctor wants more money, he must treat predominantly richer patients. This was seen to be distasteful to Britain emerging from world war II, and to many of us it still is. Health care more than any other industry is related to the dignity of the patient. That's why we view it differently from selling used cars or getting your dry cleaning done, and a somewhat collective treatment of it is deemed appropriate.
Anyway, you're probably biased against socialism as an article of faith. We've got pretty high standards. It's not like no-one in America ever pulled his own tooth. In neither country would that action be strictly necessary.
And what of value for money? I quickly found this link. I haven't judged it's accuracy yet cos I'm too busy, but according to the graph under "financing", The sum of tax and social insurance spend on health care is the same: the UK and the US each spend just under 6% GDP.
(The same table shows WHO rankings. The UK is 24th world-wide, the USA 72nd. Again, I haven't checked up what the criteria are for those rankings, sorry.)
If that link is accurate (and feel free to refute it), what's happened to the predicted efficiency gains of the private system? Why is health care in the USA is more expensive than in our more socialist system?
jez: Because we don't have wait times or government bureaucrats dictating our care?
I thought your argument was that publically run health would cost more.
jez: Well, you can always trade off quality for cost....