Common sensennow replaced by beaurocracy and MRSA. Also you can't choose your 
doctor.
It's not free you pay via taxaction.

Quoting rayilynlee <[log in to unmask]>:

> I found the British healthcare system to be characterized by  common sense 
> and decency when my mother was hospitalized in Georgetown, the Cayman 
> Islands in 1978.  I was given a free room and food because there was a free 
> room and enough food.  She paid around $250 for a five day stay.
> Ray
> 
> 
> Why I love Britain's socialized healthcare system
> As I learned when my newborn daughter was very sick, in U.K. hospitals, 
> people take care of each other
> By Stephen Amidon
> Aug. 22, 2009 |
> 
> My eldest daughter had a rough first week. Born after 22 hours of hard 
> labor, her pink skin proceeded to turn an alarming shade of yellow on the 
> second day of her life. It was a bad case of jaundice. She would need to be 
> placed in an incubator, whose ultraviolet light would hopefully clear up the
> 
> condition. If not, a transfusion would be required. My exhausted wife and I 
> watched in numb horror as our child was encased in the clear plastic box 
> that was to become her crib for the next seven days. What we had hoped would
> 
> be a straightforward delivery had turned into a nightmare.
> 
> Because I am American, and those endless days and nights were spent in a 
> maternity hospital in London, the week that followed has been very much on 
> my mind as I listen to the recent attacks on the British National Health 
> Service. It is a system that I found to be very different from the one 
> currently being described as "evil" and "Orwellian" by politicians and 
> commentators eager to use it as an example of the dark side of public 
> medicine.
> 
> I was initially skeptical about the NHS. I'd grown up comfortably in 
> suburban New Jersey; good private healthcare was always immediately 
> available through my father's insurance. When my English wife became 
> pregnant soon after we settled in London, I was alarmed by the idea of 
> having our first child born in a system I had been told was underfunded, 
> overstressed and inefficient. After all, healthcare in the UK was free. How 
> good could it be? Friends and relatives back in the States were spending 
> thousands to have children. If you get what you pay for, I was about to get 
> a whole lot of nothing.
> 
> My first glimpse of our prospective hospital was not promising. It seemed 
> crowded, aging and apparently devoid of the gleaming, beeping equipment I 
> associated with modern medicine. But our neo-natal class actually helped me 
> prepare for the upcoming birth, and the scans we received afforded the same 
> miraculous fetal glimpses we would have gotten back in New Jersey. Come 
> delivery day, an impressive team of midwives, nurses and anesthesiologists 
> attended my wife's long labor, all of them respecting her request not to opt
> 
> for a cesarean section. When things got sticky at the end, a senior 
> obstetrician appeared and the monitoring equipment beeped reassuringly.
> 
> Directly following the birth, we were taken to a large ward whose 20-odd 
> beds were separated by curtains and changing tables. It was visiting hour; 
> the place was alive with excited relatives, shellshocked fathers and the 
> constant susurrus of hungry new life. That first night, however, the 
> atmosphere grew peaceful. Crying babies were attended immediately by 
> sensibly-shod nurses so that others could sleep. But it was after my 
> daughter began to turn the color of saffron rice that I really began to 
> appreciate the NHS. The moment she showed distress, we were whisked off to a
> 
> private room, where we were looked after by a no-nonsense pediatrician and 
> the imposing Irish ward sister, or chief nurse, who quickly made it clear to
> 
> me that my sole useful contribution to the whole process had come nine 
> months earlier. Blood was drawn regularly from our daughter's tiny heel; 
> test results came back promptly. The meals were surprisingly edible. I even 
> developed a taste for the milky tea brought to me by kind nurses. My only 
> complaints over the following week were that the free cookies in the father's
> 
> lounge were always running out. And for some reason the ward sister kept 
> giving me withering looks, no matter how dutifully I attended to my family's
> 
> needs.
> 
> As my blindfolded daughter slept in the incubator's eerie violet glow, I 
> would take occasional strolls through the ward. It was the most egalitarian 
> place I had ever seen. The yuppie woman honking into her newfangled cell 
> phone, the young Pakistani mother who always seemed to be surrounded by a 
> half-dozen gift-bearing relations, the self-sufficient older woman desperate
> 
> to get home to look after her other children -- all of them were cared for 
> in exactly the same manner. Whoever needed help got it. When a terrified 
> Afghani girl arrived, rumored to be only 14 and apparently abandoned by her 
> family, several nurses dropped what they were doing to teach her the 
> rudiments of child care. The rest of the mothers waited patiently until they
> 
> were finished. Other wards were the same. There was no private wing with 
> champagne service. Everybody was in this together. If you were a woman and 
> you were in labor and you were in our part of London, this is where you 
> came. If things went wrong, skilled doctors appeared with the latest 
> technology. Nobody asked about insurance or co-pays.
> 
> This, I learned, is what the NHS is about -- common decency. It is about the
> 
> shared belief that all the people who live in the United Kingdom constitute 
> a society, and a decent society provides certain necessities for its 
> members. Freedom from hunger is one. Police protection is another. Free 
> healthcare from the cradle to the grave is simply one more item on this 
> list.
> 
> I saw this decency at work countless times over the following decade, until 
> my return to the United States. I saw it with the twice-daily home visits by
> 
> community midwives for the fortnight after each of our newborn children's 
> release from hospital, and in the vouchers for free milk we were given for 
> those babies. I saw it when our GP paid us a house call early one Sunday 
> morning to treat our son's spiking fever.
> 
> I saw it most clearly, however, in the treatment my in-laws received at the 
> end of their lives. My wife's father, who suffered from acute myloid 
> dysplasia, spent his last year receiving constant care, including several 
> sprints to the hospital for emergency transfusions, where doctors struggled 
> heroically to keep him alive. His final week was spent in a very comfortable
> 
> single hospice room whose French doors opened onto a terrace overlooking his
> 
> beloved Yorkshire moors. When he died, he left us his house, and not a penny
> 
> of healthcare debt. My mother-in-law, stricken by arthritis, got two 
> artificial hips and two knees from the NHS, and received daily home visits 
> from social workers during the last three years of her life so she would not
> 
> have to go into a nursing home. Neither of these septuagenarians was working
> 
> at the time. The amount of money spent on their care must have been 
> staggering. And yet, despite shouldering this yoke of decency, the nation 
> prospered around them. People were buying French wine and German cars and 
> second homes. They were attending Cats and supporting Arsenal and going on 
> holidays in the sun. Sure, people complained about the NHS. But the British 
> complain about everything. Living without a public health system, on the 
> other hand, was unthinkable.
> 
> On the day we were finally given the all-clear, there were no papers to 
> sign, no bills to settle. All we had to do was remove our daughter's 
> blindfold and go. But I felt I had to leave something behind. So I rushed 
> down to the local corner shop and bought several tins of cookies to give the
> 
> staff who'd looked after us so well. As luck would have it, the Irish ward 
> sister was the only one at the nurse's station when I arrived.
> 
> Before I could explain myself, she gave me a tight, approving smile.
> 
> "Wondered when you'd start chipping in," she said, returning to her 
> paperwork. "Just leave them in the father's lounge."
> -- By Stephen Amidon
> 
> 
> Rayilyn Brown
> Director AZNPF
> Arizona Chapter National Parkinson Foundation
> [log in to unmask] 
> 
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