Healthcare Utopia
But Denying Lifesaving Surgeries
By Daniel Muniz

Great Britain is often referred to as a healthcare Utopia by advocates in the United States who want the government to assume full financial responsibility for providing free medical services to everyone in this country. After all, socialized medicine already works so well in the United Kingdom and since everybody over there is happy with the results, then why not have a similar program in America?

However, the real question that people like filmmaker Michael Moore and liberal democrat politicians avoid examining is whether or not the system in Britain actually works.

First and foremost is that the word “free” doesn’t exactly mean that it doesn’t cost anything. Somebody still has to pay for it but that concept is lost upon a segment of the population who wants something for nothing. And slick politicians are keenly aware of this idealistic dichotomy. After all, the “little guy” is getting hosed by Corporate America and the rich are getting richer while the poor are getting poorer. As a result, the federal government ought to step in so they can right a wrong which is to provide free healthcare for everybody.

All that sounds great except it is not working as smoothly as intended in Britain.

It is not any big secret that around one in 10 hospitals in the United Kingdom routinely deny surgeries to certain patients, particularly if they are smokers, heavy drinkers, and the obese as well as people who participate in other “unhealthy” lifestyle choices. And as the years go by, what is deemed as “unhealthy” is beginning to take a broader definition which means that fewer people are now eligible for treatments.

So what is going on here? Isn’t Great Britain supposed to be a patient’s paradise?

The simple answer is money.

Cash strapped hospitals are finding expedient reasons to deny services so they can remain solvent. And the deeper in debt that a hospital is in, the more creative the excuses have become.

But to the starry-eyed idealist, isn’t something that is supposed to be free mean that it ought to be available to everyone at any time because after all, it is free?

Well, no. The money still has to come from somewhere to pay for it.

The common misconception is that the treasury of a nation is a bottomless pit; therefore there will always be big honking piles of cash waiting to be shoveled into any government program. That illusion is false. There is a limit to everything including free healthcare. Consequently, there is only so much money to go around and these embattled British hospitals are unable to afford the cost of providing all of its services to everyone.

But it gets worse.

The administrators of these facilities are acutely cognizant of the harsh reality of living inside a limited budget that is supposed to provide anything and everything to everyone. It simply cannot be done especially since they already know that they are not going to get the additional financial resources from the government to accomplish that goal. And without a bigger budget, treatments then have to be rationed or cut altogether.

So they have found a novel approach to circumvent this problem.

Hospitals are now demanding that the British government allow them to deny treatments to anyone who is deemed as too old or as living an unhealthy lifestyle. And of course, they also want to be able to define what those standards are and it is particularly troublesome when the elderly is factored into that equation.

Naturally, this request has outraged the public in the United Kingdom.

Instead of doctors basing their decisions on clinical reasons, they are going to use a moral criterion. But many Brits see right through it and feel that this is nothing more than a ruse to mask the financial rationale in the determination of whether or not someone is deemed as acceptable to have a surgery.

The sad irony is that the advocates for free healthcare in the United States cite money as the reason to why people do not have access to the medical services that they need. In the Utopian paradise of Great Britain, money is slowly becoming the chief reason to why people are refused treatments.

But the twist with the United Kingdom is that once the government takes care of all of your responsibilities and solves all of your problems, you then have to live with the outcome because you still don’t have a choice for any alternatives. Brits that have been sold into socialized medicine may become increasingly uncomfortable when the government starts playing God with deciding who is too old and too unhealthy to have lifesaving surgeries. 

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