Various British papers, including The Telegraph, are reporting the U.K.'s National Health Service, or NHS, will begin refusing surgery to obese people and smokers. They write:
Hospital leaders in North Yorkshire said that patients with a body mass index (BMI) of 30 or above – as well as smokers – will be barred from most surgery for up to a year amid increasingly desperate measures to plug a funding black hole. The restrictions will apply to standard hip and knee operations.Note to non-Anglophiles: "Other trusts" means the rest of Britain. The basic issue is money; Brits use more "free" health care than they are willing to support with tax dollars.
The decision, described by the Royal College of Surgeons as the “most severe the modern NHS has ever seen”, led to warnings that other trusts will soon be forced to follow suit and rationing will become the norm if the current funding crisis continues.
What vicarious learning do I suggest you undertake? Understand government-funded health care always is short of funds. Rationing, of the sort described above, is the common response. Long wait times for surgery for non-life-threatening conditions are the norm in places like Canada, Britain. We've seen this sort of mess at our Veterans Affairs hospitals.
The current, long-predicted failures of Obamacare may have been intentional, as a way to backdoor Americans into a single payer (government) system. It is important we don't go along; that road leads to rationing and death panels.
See how the Brits have stumbled and learn from their pain. We don't need to repeat their mistakes in order to know not to take the path they took.
