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One reason that Brits are so ardent about their National Health Service is that it started in 1947, almost exactly when doctors, after thousands of years fiddling with mostly ineffectual medicines, suddenly had the wonder drug of wonder drugs: antibiotics.
“Oh, your baby has an earache and you are worried he might die or at least go deaf in one ear and his crying has kept you sleepless for two nights in a row? Here, have a prescription for penicillin. It works.”
In 1924, President Coolidge’s 16-year-old son played tennis on the White House court. He developed a blister, which became infected. Within a few days, the boy was dead.
Coolidge wrote in his autobiography: “When he went, the power and the glory of the Presidency went with him.”
Then, suddenly, in the later 1940s, the heretofore eternally omnipresent fear that a loved one would be taken suddenly by an infection was … gone.
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Antibiotics should be reserved for the people who discovered them. Fair’s fair, right?
Let’s make the rule retroactive too.
Heh heh heh heh
The main reason is that no Briton is ever bankrupted by medical and hospital bills.
Which, I’m led to believe, is a common occurrence in the States.
But you don't care about those murdered dead, so long as you don't have to pay for anything, eh little sociopath?
Remember Alfie Evans.
https://edition.cnn.com/2018/04/29/opinions/alfie-evans-opinion-snead/index.html
I went for awhile not paying any medical bills at all and they just send them to collections which goes through the motions of calling you a few times. But usually they'll work things out with you.
If your pockets are deep you should probably take precautions to prevent this state of affairs but if your pockets are deep you probably already have or don't need to because you're covered.Replies: @Dr. Krankenschmaltz, @donut, @Bill Jones, @Dan Smith
https://edition.cnn.com/2020/05/01/health/health-care-europe-us-medical-bills-coronavirus-intl/index.html
She was asked to pay thousands for her coronavirus treatment, he got a free ride. She's American. He's Italian
Americans refuse national health care because they don't want to pay the expenses of obese cigarette smoking drug addicted drunken POC's who have no relationship to them whatsoever.
And, had Britain been multicultural in 1947...?
Nowadays they are slapped with DNRs if they are over 65 or severely handicapped.
All get COVID toe-tags, while the British public claps and bangs pots.Replies: @Anonymous, @Alexander Turok
There were years before the ACA when I had to cover about $50,000 annually in insurance premiums and medical bills . I'm self-employed, and the only plan we could get had two $10,000 deductibles. In other words, the medical expenses of not one but two members of the family had to exceed $10,000 before all bills were covered. One of our daughters has an expensive chronic medical condition which easily met the $10,000 mark annually, but the rest of the family could have each spent $9,999 without our having achieved full coverage.
We're not bankrupt, but I had to draw down our retirement savings considerably.
All I know is that I've never heard of anyone from another country with a universal public health system who shares this view
It's just a fact of life that for whatever reason UK health staff leave the country in droves . The UK exports large numbers of medical staff and in turn imports large numbers from the non rich world .
Australian doctors I know say that UK hospitals are a great place to get very wide experience which isn't quite the same thing as saying it's a great system for patients . I understand military doctors say something along similar lines
Mind you no sensible person will speak well of the US system
My Irish cousin contracted a Strep infection at the age of 18. Three days later, the infection having reached the lining of his heart, he was dead. That was 1993. In fairness, that could have happened in the US as well. But I’d take my chances here, at least in 1993.
Everyone in Ireland praises their equivalent of the NHS until it comes time to use it. The staff are heavily foreign and heavily incompetent. The private health clinics there are, on the other hand, cheap and fairly good.
Another cousin had an ACL tear repaired privately. It cost 1800.00 euro a few years ago. Another had a hip replacement, also done privately. That was just under 20,000 euro for everything down to the acetaminophen tablets.
Socialized healthcare seems to decay fairly rapidly.
The NHS is the one 'British' thing pretty much all Catholics in the North prefer to the Republic. (Sinn Fein recently put up a pro-NHS wall mural - the first ever 'British' mural on their famous Belfast International Wall, along side other international heroes such as George Floyd & Catalan communists). When I visited a relative at a Belfast hospital in 2018 who was not getting satisfactory treatment the nurse - who had a Gaelic ie Catholic/Nationalist/Republican name - got defensive and pointed out that the patient was lucky he was here as it would be much worse if he were down south where, God help them, they have no NHS. That love of the NHS extends to even those who want to break from the UK is telling.
From an outsider's perspective the whole NHS thing looks like a cult. Based on most statistics I've seen the NHS gets pretty poor results relative to most of the EU when it comes to everything from cancer survival rates to waiting times for minor & major operations. (In the last 20 yrs two of my cousins have ended up having to go private due to having to wait well over a year for knee operations). The UK's covid performance was also pathetic; that seems to have been forgotten now due to being faster on vaccinations. There may have been good reasons to love the NHS back in 1950s but today it's heroic reputation is due to a combination of parochialism (it's an island nation!) and media propaganda.Replies: @J.Ross, @James N. Kennett, @Reg Cæsar
What did Coolidge mean by this?
So for Australians then? https://www.abc.net.au/science/slab/florey/story.htm
Calvin Jr died of septicemia, which will kill you today. Just lost an in-law to it. Her husband was told that the underlying infection was strep throat. She was 67 years old.
One reason that Brits are so ardent about their National Health Service is that it started in 1947, almost exactly when doctors, after thousands of years fiddling with mostly ineffectual medicines, suddenly had the wonder drug of wonder drugs: antibiotics.
I had rather hoped that I was the first person to think of that. Probably not, then?
Anyway: to the good folks of the USA. Reform your health care how you will but I caution you: do not copy the NHS. There are far better schemes elsewhere.
Wondering if your year and a half slavish devotion to all things mainstream medicine might have been misguided? How is the covid hysteria working out for you in July 2021?
[OT] Steve, have you seen this thread or, by any chance, read the book, Left Behind in Rosedale?
He was at the top of his profession, having won election as President, but he was sad because his son had died.
Anyway, I can argue about the British NHS another time, but thank you for bringing up the story of Calvin Coolidge's lost son. Yes, antibiotics were a wonderful discovery/invention.
.
* He did his job nicely in signing the Immigration Restriction Act of 1924!Replies: @Alden, @Danindc
In this very important event the "power and glory of the Presidency" didn't amount to anything.
(Although if we look at it through a probabilistic lens it is likely that his son benefited from being well fed and his whole life and from the best palliative care available. Though he died, his chances for survival were probably considerably better than an impoverished half-starved poor kid. But his general observation stands)
A nit, but in 1924 Coolidge had not yet won an election as President. He had recently taken over from Harding, but the 1924 election (which Coolidge did win) had not happened when his son died.Replies: @Steve Sailer
Everyone in Ireland praises their equivalent of the NHS until it comes time to use it. The staff are heavily foreign and heavily incompetent. The private health clinics there are, on the other hand, cheap and fairly good.
Another cousin had an ACL tear repaired privately. It cost 1800.00 euro a few years ago. Another had a hip replacement, also done privately. That was just under 20,000 euro for everything down to the acetaminophen tablets.
Socialized healthcare seems to decay fairly rapidly.Replies: @Steve Sailer, @Jonathan Mason, @slumber_j, @Matra, @Alden
The surgeons employed by American major league sports teams tend to be extremely rich men who require their patients to fly into Aspen (e.g., Kobe Bryant’s unfortunate trip to Colorado).
I would have thought that there was less oxygen for the healing process.Replies: @Jonathan Mason, @Charlotte, @res
Spot on, Steve. My personal opinion is that sulfa and penicillin, neither of which were discovered (invented?) by medical doctors, transformed the kindly but mostly ineffective sawbones who did house calls into something of a miracle worker who could revive the nearly dead.
Unfortunately, neither America’s doctors nor America’s government saw fit to re-examine medicine’s role in society now that doctors really had something of the power of life over those whom they treated, and frankly the power of death over those whom they didn’t wish to treat.
So it was that when state-licensed medical doctors finessed the uninsured cash patient from medical practice beginning in the mid-1970s, Congress sniffed and passed EMTALA, the “ER treatment” bill that’s widely and willfully misconstrued by politicians and laymen as providing timely and effective medical treatment at no charge to the patient. It’s a pretty safe bet MDs violated the political terms under which medical licensure was granted them, but no one cared to notice.
Nothing to see here, nothing to discuss, let’s move on is the message to those foolish enough to raise questions about any aspect of American health care.
I had pneumonia in 1958, but the NHS doctor came to my house and gave me a shot of penicillin with a good old glass and steel syringe, and probably saved my life.
Actually by 1947 streptomycin, which is the most effective antibiotic treatment for TB was already available. It didn’t save George Orwell who was allergic to it but pretty much put an end to the scourge of TB.
The NHS certainly changed life expectancy. My father lost his mother (TB, aged 29), stepmother, father, and stepfather all before he was 18, and my mother lost her father at 21 in 1944.
Then from 1944 to 1982 not a single person died in my family.
My mother, myself, and my 3 sisters all worked for the NHS, and although I left the UK in 1980, I still have an NHS pension of $250 per month, based on 5 years of service from 1975 to 1980.
True, but I was surprised to learn recently that TB rates in Britain had already declined enormously before the antibiotics finished the job.Replies: @Jonathan Mason
Not sure why you attribute that to the NHS specifically as opposed to improvements in medicine generally.
They have a lot of rich patients skiing in every winter in Aspen, so why live in a crowded metropolis and deal with government insurers?
Everyone in Ireland praises their equivalent of the NHS until it comes time to use it. The staff are heavily foreign and heavily incompetent. The private health clinics there are, on the other hand, cheap and fairly good.
Another cousin had an ACL tear repaired privately. It cost 1800.00 euro a few years ago. Another had a hip replacement, also done privately. That was just under 20,000 euro for everything down to the acetaminophen tablets.
Socialized healthcare seems to decay fairly rapidly.Replies: @Steve Sailer, @Jonathan Mason, @slumber_j, @Matra, @Alden
You can get private surgery in the UK if you want it. However the surgeon and the anesthesiologist will often be NHS workers who are moonlighting,
The hospitals are much better equipped than the private clinics, which tend to cherry pick profitable procedures such as abortions.
However the food does tend to be better in the private clinics, and they make a better cup of tea.
People tend to use the private clinics for convenience, especially if they have private insurance, but if they are seriously ill they usually revert to the NHS.
Strangely enough the royal family does not use the NHS, even though NHS hospitals are considered to be crown property.
I do not know why Megan Markle was not able to get psychiatric treatment on the NHS. If she had presented herself at an emergency room and said that she was suicidal, she would probably have been detained under the mental health act, and admitted to an NHS psychiatric bed.
Probably the rest of the royal family did not know this.
Where are you getting your information? Private care in the UK, except for little tests that some people pay out for convenience, tends to be exceptional. This is because it is enormously expensive and seems to mostly serve Arab oil sheikhs, billionaires and the Royal family. The very best professors at training hospitals tend to be the ones who "moonlight" and they are paid exceptionally well to dedicate generous time to their patients.
You'd be looking at £20k+ a night, as a medium to long-term patient, in such a facility in London, for the type of cancer that needs constant treatment. Unsurprisingly, the service is incredible.Replies: @James N. Kennett, @Lurker
Harry was already in therapy, but perhaps his self absorption prevented him from detecting his wife's symptoms. Still, one might think that with the money he inherited from Diana that he could have incentivized his therapist to squeeze Meghan into the schedule.
Therapy is like "equality" in that one can never arrive. There is always "work" to be done. So a "good" therapist retains a customer for life. It is an annuity. Harry assuming the "executive" position with that mental health company will be getting an annuity --he is following on the tradition of the Royals taking rents from enclosed estates where once the peasants freely hunted. But, his brave and lonely fight against privilege inoculates him against criticismReplies: @Art Deco, @James N. Kennett
I do not know why you believe this proven--and self-confessed--liar actually sought psychiatric treatment while living in the UK.
Maybe she never sought it and her claims in the interview were an exercise in self-dramatization. What business was she in 'ere she got her talons into Harry?
(While we're at it, psychiatrists are dandy generators of iatrogenic problems; wouldn't surprise me if the Queen, Prince Philip, Princess Anne &c told her to do herself a favor and stay away from them).Replies: @James N. Kennett
Everyone in Ireland praises their equivalent of the NHS until it comes time to use it. The staff are heavily foreign and heavily incompetent. The private health clinics there are, on the other hand, cheap and fairly good.
Another cousin had an ACL tear repaired privately. It cost 1800.00 euro a few years ago. Another had a hip replacement, also done privately. That was just under 20,000 euro for everything down to the acetaminophen tablets.
Socialized healthcare seems to decay fairly rapidly.Replies: @Steve Sailer, @Jonathan Mason, @slumber_j, @Matra, @Alden
Staffing in a lot of US hospitals isn’t a whole lot better.
As to your second point: yes, emphatically. Having a zero-cost option in the market drags prices elsewhere down to a reasonable level. I learned this when I lived in Spain in the 90s, where I could buy extremely low-cost and high-quality private medical insurance thanks to the parallel existence of a free alternative.
Not having the whole fictional price-structure that goes along with our extremely bureaucratized “system” helps a lot too, and is perhaps the most important advantage you gain by having a national health system. Try buying insulin for your daughter on the free market in the US for example.
An anecdote: when the daughter in question failed to wake up on my birthday three years ago in Rome (spring vacation) because she was in a coma, we were fortunate to have the best pediatric hospital in Italy about a mile from where we were staying. We hadn’t known that she had type 1 diabetes, but we sure did find out that morning. She was in a coma for 36 hours, so two nights in the ICU, then a further six nights in a normal room.
Toward the end of her stay we realized we would have to pay for it ourselves then see if our crappy insurance would reimburse us. (Miraculously it did–or at least part of it, with most of it credited against our large deductible.) So we went to the billing office, where the head of money for the hospital told us (all in Italian and extremely apologetically–ashamed, basically) that we owed the hospital five thousand Euro.
We had to pay the $6,182.00 over two days, because the hospital’s credit card system wasn’t allowed to accept that much at one time from a single customer.
I don't recommend the experience of being there for over a week when you're thirteen and have just found out you have a lifelong life-threatening chronic illness...but if you have to eat hospital food, l'Ospedale Pediatrico Bambino Gesù is a pretty good place to do it.Replies: @Alden
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sKjHvpiHk3s
Salaries in Singapore are equal to American salaries.
Singapore has the best government in the world.Replies: @Dacian Julien Soros, @slumber_j
I have two kids with nut allergies. I was really pleased when Joe Manchin’s daughter raised the price of epipens from 30 to 600.00 a couple of years ago. Epipens that were developed by DARPA as an antidote to nerve gas.
Long may she burn in hell.Replies: @slumber_j, @Not Raul
*convenience for cheap and simple procedures is the only remaining point.
Is there some advantage to performing sports surgery at altitude?
I would have thought that there was less oxygen for the healing process.
1. Access to skiing.
2. US athletes congregating at high altitude for training. For example https://coloradosprings.gov/olympic-city-usaReplies: @Abolish_public_education, @Dan Hayes
I personally think that silent Cal was probably our greatest President in the last 100 years.
I wonder if Coolidge might have stood for re-election in 1928 if his son had lived. In which case he would have been President when the 1929 crash occurred (or perhaps did not occur under his leadership) and could have righted the ship and we might have avoided so much of what came later.
MRSA on the Rise: Infections Have Doubled in 5 Years
Of course, starting from a low number, a 100% increase which takes years to happen is not very impressive. As seen in the current pandemic, though, after a while and several doublings it tends to get out of hand. Which is too bad. Like messenger RNA technology and CRISPR, properly used antibiotics could be a blessing. Contra Mae West, too much of a good thing can be also less than wonderful.
Historically, the UK has been rather less ethnically diverse than the US, but perhaps it has had more of a class divide. The unifying effect here of the second world war reduced the rich and able’s objections to paying to save the rest from the nightmare of untreated illness.
When compared to its benefits, the costs of the NHS are hidden. As with other long-tailed risks, any insurance is a net benefit, but the popularity of the NHS solution depends on the eroding foundations of fellow-feeling and scarcity of free-loaders.
My own experience of the NHS is that the general practitioners have been very good. The hospital care has been mixed, and frequently comically inept–at least when I was given sufficient opiates to appreciate it. I imagine that I was only made aware of a minority of the mistakes.
For all the NHS’s faults though, the US system seems petrifying from here, with its risks of unnecessary death and bankruptcy.
p.s. Italian hospital food–Italian children’s hospital food anyway–is an astonishment. Real bread, real extra-virgin olive oil, real prosciutto, actual fruit you’d actively want to eat… The pasta is correctly sauced and cooked, or as correctly as possible under the circumstances.
I don’t recommend the experience of being there for over a week when you’re thirteen and have just found out you have a lifelong life-threatening chronic illness…but if you have to eat hospital food, l’Ospedale Pediatrico Bambino Gesù is a pretty good place to do it.
Which, I'm led to believe, is a common occurrence in the States.Replies: @R.G. Camara, @Desiderius, @Redneck farmer, @Bardon Kaldian, @Barnard, @Currahee, @The Alarmist, @Colin Wright, @Harry Baldwin, @Michelle, @sb
Of course; the NHS just murders anyone who is inconvenient to it.
But you don’t care about those murdered dead, so long as you don’t have to pay for anything, eh little sociopath?
Remember Alfie Evans.
https://edition.cnn.com/2018/04/29/opinions/alfie-evans-opinion-snead/index.html
BCBS whittled my 2 week hospital stay, with tests up the wazoo and surgery, down to 13% of what was billed. That’s why the uninsured go bust. When they aggregate US medical costs, which figure do they use?
As near as I can tell, the reason for the NHS cult is this. Labour created the NHS and so are proud of it. Tories were so what ambivalent wanting something a bit more economically rational and private. So Labour kept attacking them with brutal effect throughout the 90s and 00s. So the gave up and flipped and starting aping Labour NHS cult worship so Labour couldn’t attack them, even attacking Labour health record in government from the left. Labour and labour’s left liberal cultural allies, pissed that their best weapon is gone have also doubled down. So Britain is caught in a vicious circle of cult worship.
And they are so entitled, they'll rather let little children die than letting them take a chance, however slim, at treatment abroad.
Damn Steve, you’re the Sgt. Friday of historians.
Never fail to enlighten.
I would have thought that there was less oxygen for the healing process.Replies: @Jonathan Mason, @Charlotte, @res
https://highaltitudehealth.com/2019/12/06/increased-risks-of-orthopedic-surgery-at-altitude/
While Calvin Coolidge was never a talkative sort, the extreme terseness that gave rise to the Silent Cal moniker grew much worse after his son’s death. Today most doctors likely would diagnose it as depression. Coolidge also slept as many as eleven hours a day, another possible sign of depression.
To be fair, these also could have been signs of poor physical health. Less than four years after leaving office Coolidge dropped dead of heart failure at age 60. Given the timeline he probably had been experiencing heart disease while still in office.
While Calvin Jr. died very young, his brother John lived to 93.
I remember in the 80s and 90s hearing about lots of various baseball players going to see Dr. James Andrews in Alabama for surgery.
Structural things aside — setting broken bones, stitching up wounds, etc. — there was well-nigh nothing a doctor could do for you before about 1930. Lewis Thomas reports that his doctor father’s medicine bag ca. 1910 had quinine, digitalis, and lots of different-colored water.
- Erasmus
I'm just reading A.J. Cronin's (creator of Dr Finlay if you're a Brit) autobiographical "Adventures In Two Worlds". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A._J._Cronin Not quite true. A lot of things which could be cured by antibiotics post-45 could still be attacked by surgery.His first call out in the 20s as a general practitioner was to a boy dying of diptheria, he had to perform a tracheotomy by candlelight on a kitchen table. On another occasion he operated in similar conditions on a girl with acute suppurative mastoiditis, worrying about cutting too deep and killing her, uncomfortably aware of her father, demented with worry and with a reputation for mania, watching him closely.On the other hand he had to watch people fading away with TB.Replies: @MEH 0910
And there was the one young Canadian woman I heard on a BBC radio show. She complained how Canada is supposedly a single payer system, but if a pharmaceutical is not approved for payment, but is for treatment, the sick person is responsible for payment. Which apparently is very expensive.
Which, I'm led to believe, is a common occurrence in the States.Replies: @R.G. Camara, @Desiderius, @Redneck farmer, @Bardon Kaldian, @Barnard, @Currahee, @The Alarmist, @Colin Wright, @Harry Baldwin, @Michelle, @sb
Not really.
I went for awhile not paying any medical bills at all and they just send them to collections which goes through the motions of calling you a few times. But usually they’ll work things out with you.
If your pockets are deep you should probably take precautions to prevent this state of affairs but if your pockets are deep you probably already have or don’t need to because you’re covered.
https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/medical-bankruptcy-is-killing-the-american-middle-class-2019-02-14
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/11/10/americans-are-drowning-in-medical-debt-what-to-know-if-you-need-help.html
https://www.gq.com/story/medical-debt-bankruptcies
Brits have this weird love of the NHS that they think everyone in America envies them. In truth, the NHS murders their patients (including Alfie Evans) , delivers piss-poor service, and is otherwise evil.
Much like their vaunted BBC and police force, which assists child molesters like Jimmy Saville and Muslim rapists and pimps In Rotherham and punished people who accused them.
Britain is a dystopia with a cheeky accent and some good pr. Slaves.
Singapore offers American-quality health care, but at one-quarter the cost:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sKjHvpiHk3s
Salaries in Singapore are equal to American salaries.
Singapore has the best government in the world.
Which, I'm led to believe, is a common occurrence in the States.Replies: @R.G. Camara, @Desiderius, @Redneck farmer, @Bardon Kaldian, @Barnard, @Currahee, @The Alarmist, @Colin Wright, @Harry Baldwin, @Michelle, @sb
This is true. That a lot of seriously ill individuals file for bankruptcy due to reduced income is a coincidence.
Collective bargaining is the primary power of the People against the collective capital of the Elite.
Medicine is a profession and not some magical Diagon Alley Harry Potter fantasy, it’s the same as telecom technician, structural engineer and builder.
Should Americans see that their own collective health is best sought through a cannibalistic war-on-all capitalistic free for all then let Americans reap the whirlwind!
But remember: the capitalist in his collective capital hideout is always privatising his profits, whilst he’s socialising his losses, on you.
The typical post world war ii boomer has a brain beset by all sort of phantasms the worst the fear of an intellect greater than their own opposed to their own love of of the collective wisdom of the combined forces of capitalism. Should a big tech pharma like Pfizer seek indemnity from adverse reactions then the likes of your stock standard Boomer demands government act on the collective and grant them immunity on the collective’s behalf.
Should some poor 20 something worker with minimal risk from Covid complain that mandatory vaccines are a breach of his rights, FUCK HIM!, is the judgement as the hammer falls on the individual on behalf of collective opinion propagandised to act in concert with private corporations.
I just thought we had better in us than this capitulation
Run-on sentences = run-on cognition. George Orwell said something similar to that.
The reason people like it is because immigration hadn’t started to such a huge extent. A public collective service was established to help and support people like you in the aftermath of a collective-consciousness raising event of total war. It also represents one of the few forms of real social democracy put in place in Britain, the kinds of policies that a large number of people in Britain look on in envy at in other northern protestant countries. (Albeit countries that didn’t have as ingrained a class divide)
The fact that it tends to be more poorly run than it’s equivalents in Northern Europe says more about cultural and social trends and management ideologies in the Anglosphere than anything else.
The idea that if Britain had a private system like America that very large sections of the British public wouldn’t be seriously worse off like their cohorts in the US is simply untrue.
Meanwhile, in America, serious ethnic displacement and conflict from the great wave and in the South, racial divisions meant that large-scale social welfare projects became very difficult to find support for in the same way by mid century as they became ethnic conflicts rather than debates about the common good since the common good isn’t supposed to be different from the ethnic good.
It’s a who/whom issue as is Libertarian or right-wing economic support in a great many cases.
Diversity makes support for social welfare decline for obvious reasons. If one group is richer it will be less inclined to support higher taxes or spending on things that will go disproportionately to another.
As came up in another recent post, Denmark has one of the flattest landscape and subsequently homogeneous populations anywhere in Europe. It’s not an accident that it is also the place where social democracy and anti-immigration politics are finally finding some serious political representation in the mainstream. I’m just surprised it took form within the existing mainstream left.
Read an exhaustive and provocative comment years ago – I think on iSteve but dont quote me – how antibiotics launched the gay rights / liberation movement. The idea (going from memory) went something like this:
– societal taboos on male homosexuality are grounded in public health concerns, ie, scourge of STDs like gonorrhea and syphilis which led to long term complications or even death. “Homophobia” was grounded in public health concerns (and still is looking at the epidemiological evidence).
– widespread use of antibiotics removed the fatality and ameliorated the harshest of these STDs complications, making it a manageable risk and arguably a ‘nuisance’ for gay men. Hence a green light to “industrial scale promiscuity” (c) S. SAILER
-coincident with this, WW2 and the aging of a certain immigrant cohort into far left social activism during the post WW2 era leading into the 60s simultaneously opened the pandora’s box so of course there are other contributing factors in this liberation movement.
– the false sense of safety and protection that antibiotics supposedly provided played out in a Soros like cycle of “reflexivity” as antibiotic resistant strains developed and more vile practices became common.
-This charming write up about the “clap doctor” in NYC/Greenwich Village during the 70s & 80s provides some …..anatomically explicit details https://www.virusmyth.org/aids/hiv/bnclapdoctor.htm
Almost suicidal.
p.s. Italian hospital food–Italian children’s hospital food anyway–is an astonishment. Real bread, real extra-virgin olive oil, real prosciutto, actual fruit you’d actively want to eat… The pasta is correctly sauced and cooked, or as correctly as possible under the circumstances.
It’s not just in institutional food that Italy excels, there is a ‘La Dolce Vita’ sensibility in the most surprising parts of Italian society. I used to deal in military surplus as a side gig and the quality/luxury of some Italian surplus was astounding. The Italian Air Force had some Rosenthal quality espresso sets, fine linen tablecloths etc. I still have a couple of navy uniforms I converted to civilian suits ( just a matter of replacing gold buttons) that are comparable to Corneliani et al in quality of material , cut and tailoring. I’m sure a lot of this is driven by corruption of one sort or another,which is endemic in Italy, but it is remarkable nonetheless and can result in very pleasant surprises.
https://fthmb.tqn.com/VhG8bU6yywCuCNNPBFjd1HKgAE4=/4300x3941/filters:fill(auto,1)/GettyImages-200235655-010-571e6fb03df78c564077b5f8.jpg
There is a lot about the NHS to love. Young English doctors are underpaid and overworked; which gives them kudos which approaches that which comes from national military service.
It also functions fine, and it is nice knowing that everyone gets health care.
Most importantly, the NHS is the last serious institution that is left for patriotism. The military is gutted and hidden away. Sports are unserious. The BBC hates patriotism. The Church of England is a mess, and mostly hates patriotism too.
What else have we got left to function as the institution embodying our voice as a people? The Queen is equally popular, though she doesn’t conduct hip surgery on your granny.
Jonathan, I often disagree with you, but thanks for the pleasant, witty, response. I’m glad the NHS did so much good for you and your family. I’m not surprised that the Irish system doesn’t do as well.
Yes, if “moonlighting” involves having a lot more time and resources to dedicate to the patient, and if only the best tend to be able to “moonlight”.
Private clinics can’t “cherry pick.” Their patients pick. Private clinics are also better equipped. They are often enormously expensive and have use of NHS equipment too.
No, they don’t revert to the NHS, if insurance will pay.
No, they probably wouldn’t have detained her. Doing so is extremely hard and would not happen unless she was holding a knife to her own throat.
Where are you getting your information? Private care in the UK, except for little tests that some people pay out for convenience, tends to be exceptional. This is because it is enormously expensive and seems to mostly serve Arab oil sheikhs, billionaires and the Royal family. The very best professors at training hospitals tend to be the ones who “moonlight” and they are paid exceptionally well to dedicate generous time to their patients.
You’d be looking at £20k+ a night, as a medium to long-term patient, in such a facility in London, for the type of cancer that needs constant treatment. Unsurprisingly, the service is incredible.
Most people cannot afford comprehensive private health care in old age. But private surgery begins to look attractive if you need a cataract operation or hip replacement, and you have savings, and you do not want to spend 2 years on the NHS waiting list.Replies: @JMcG
I’m very glad to hear that your daughter survived such an ordeal.
I have two kids with nut allergies. I was really pleased when Joe Manchin’s daughter raised the price of epipens from 30 to 600.00 a couple of years ago. Epipens that were developed by DARPA as an antidote to nerve gas.
Long may she burn in hell.
Anyway, thanks for the kind words.
Sort of. It also means that low cost private care is mostly pointless*; leaving only the type of care that requires monopoly money to buy.
*convenience for cheap and simple procedures is the only remaining point.
It's not just in institutional food that Italy excels, there is a 'La Dolce Vita' sensibility in the most surprising parts of Italian society. I used to deal in military surplus as a side gig and the quality/luxury of some Italian surplus was astounding. The Italian Air Force had some Rosenthal quality espresso sets, fine linen tablecloths etc. I still have a couple of navy uniforms I converted to civilian suits ( just a matter of replacing gold buttons) that are comparable to Corneliani et al in quality of material , cut and tailoring. I'm sure a lot of this is driven by corruption of one sort or another,which is endemic in Italy, but it is remarkable nonetheless and can result in very pleasant surprises.Replies: @JMcG, @Dissident
I honeymooned in Northern Italy and it was ineffable.
What sort of biscuits do they provide?
Do you actually believe anything Markle said is remotely close to what actually happened? The “princess” combines millennial entitlement with race hustling, the worst of all worlds.
Let's make the rule retroactive too.Replies: @Hank Archer, @Thomm
Agree – no cultural appropriation!
I went for awhile not paying any medical bills at all and they just send them to collections which goes through the motions of calling you a few times. But usually they'll work things out with you.
If your pockets are deep you should probably take precautions to prevent this state of affairs but if your pockets are deep you probably already have or don't need to because you're covered.Replies: @Dr. Krankenschmaltz, @donut, @Bill Jones, @Dan Smith
In the USA insurance companies act as protection rackets on behalf of their customers. The hospital rack rate is nothing but a work of fiction and is most certainly negotiable.
Which, I'm led to believe, is a common occurrence in the States.Replies: @R.G. Camara, @Desiderius, @Redneck farmer, @Bardon Kaldian, @Barnard, @Currahee, @The Alarmist, @Colin Wright, @Harry Baldwin, @Michelle, @sb
It depends.
https://edition.cnn.com/2020/05/01/health/health-care-europe-us-medical-bills-coronavirus-intl/index.html
She was asked to pay thousands for her coronavirus treatment, he got a free ride. She’s American. He’s Italian
Steve, we got what we’ve worked for for 400 years!
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9793551/NFL-plans-play-Black-national-anthem-ahead-2021-season.html
probably more like they have little else to be proud of, so they attach to the most flimsy stuff, which is the way Canadians show pride as well. some government bureaucracy is all that’s left to feel any sense of worth about. it’s especially crazy considering they have some of the worst teeth in the world. what’s so great about a system that produces decayed mush mouths.
who exactly becomes ‘proud’ of second rate doctors they’re forced to wait too long to see? that’s the kind of thing the average person gets reduced to when showing pride in anything of value becomes socially unacceptable. it’s even worse than Republicans being so axiomatically for low tax rates. it’s a position that they can’t attacked for, so they reflexively retreat to that.
wealthy americans with quick access to the best medical care in the world because they can pay out of pocket…don’t spend one second being ‘proud’ of it or telling everybody about it. Brits and Canadians on the other hand are like the guy who just ran a marathon. has anybody ever ran a marathon and NOT told everybody that they just ran a marathon?
I always thought Trump could have learned a lesson from Silent Cal’s example.
It also functions fine, and it is nice knowing that everyone gets health care.
Most importantly, the NHS is the last serious institution that is left for patriotism. The military is gutted and hidden away. Sports are unserious. The BBC hates patriotism. The Church of England is a mess, and mostly hates patriotism too.
What else have we got left to function as the institution embodying our voice as a people? The Queen is equally popular, though she doesn't conduct hip surgery on your granny.Replies: @Bernie
My friend lives outside Manchester and complains about the NHS constantly. Mainly the backlog in terms of waiting for an appointment. You have to suffer in pain until they have an opening. Much of the staff where he is are foreigners and he questions their competence and how much they care about the health of whites.
Everyone in Ireland praises their equivalent of the NHS until it comes time to use it. The staff are heavily foreign and heavily incompetent. The private health clinics there are, on the other hand, cheap and fairly good.
Another cousin had an ACL tear repaired privately. It cost 1800.00 euro a few years ago. Another had a hip replacement, also done privately. That was just under 20,000 euro for everything down to the acetaminophen tablets.
Socialized healthcare seems to decay fairly rapidly.Replies: @Steve Sailer, @Jonathan Mason, @slumber_j, @Matra, @Alden
Everyone in Ireland praises their equivalent of the NHS until it comes time to use it.
The NHS is the one ‘British’ thing pretty much all Catholics in the North prefer to the Republic. (Sinn Fein recently put up a pro-NHS wall mural – the first ever ‘British’ mural on their famous Belfast International Wall, along side other international heroes such as George Floyd & Catalan communists). When I visited a relative at a Belfast hospital in 2018 who was not getting satisfactory treatment the nurse – who had a Gaelic ie Catholic/Nationalist/Republican name – got defensive and pointed out that the patient was lucky he was here as it would be much worse if he were down south where, God help them, they have no NHS. That love of the NHS extends to even those who want to break from the UK is telling.
From an outsider’s perspective the whole NHS thing looks like a cult. Based on most statistics I’ve seen the NHS gets pretty poor results relative to most of the EU when it comes to everything from cancer survival rates to waiting times for minor & major operations. (In the last 20 yrs two of my cousins have ended up having to go private due to having to wait well over a year for knee operations). The UK’s covid performance was also pathetic; that seems to have been forgotten now due to being faster on vaccinations. There may have been good reasons to love the NHS back in 1950s but today it’s heroic reputation is due to a combination of parochialism (it’s an island nation!) and media propaganda.
It’s called “monopsony”. Walmart is the US master of the art.
I would have thought that there was less oxygen for the healing process.Replies: @Jonathan Mason, @Charlotte, @res
Uh, I believe the advantage is that the surgeon need not suffer too large an interruption to his time on the ski slopes! A relative of mine is a ski instructor at Aspen. He’s got some interesting stories to tell about the rich and famous (as well as the rich and obscure).
Nigel Farage and his happy warriors made a big deal about foreigners swamping England’s National Health Service and I think that was a big hit with English ladies.
The nasty and treasonous clods in the English Ruling Class then went out of their way to say how many foreigners are working at the NHS which then brings up the question of absolute numbers of foreigners swamping the NHS and the pay rate of the NHS and whether or not it is a good thing to drag foreigners away from their regions of origin thereby depriving those people in those nations of health care workers.
Boris Johnson is a vile politician whore rich boy slob who pushes nation-wrecking mass legal immigration and Boris Johnson must be removed from the leadership of the Tories immediately.
BO JO MUST GO!
Tweets from 2015:
Which, I'm led to believe, is a common occurrence in the States.Replies: @R.G. Camara, @Desiderius, @Redneck farmer, @Bardon Kaldian, @Barnard, @Currahee, @The Alarmist, @Colin Wright, @Harry Baldwin, @Michelle, @sb
I have seen a lot of credit reports over the years, the number of people with medical collections who pay the rest of their bills on time is small. A decent reporter can find someone with a sob story and spin it into an anecdote that makes people believe millions of Americans would be doing just great financially if not for their medical bills. It isn’t true. Some people have to fight insurance companies for getting certain treatments covered. In a situation like the NHS the result would be significant number of them wouldn’t be offered that treatment or would have to wait so long they have been harmed by the delay. The NHS is also starting to blacklist “racists” who object to being seen by foreign doctors with varying degrees of competence. There is no doubt the British government would have no problem sacrificing some old white people on the alter of diversity. But hey, at least they didn’t have to pay a bill when they went to the doctor.
Presumably the NHS has somehow monopolised all the vibrancy for itself.
Structural things aside -- setting broken bones, stitching up wounds, etc. -- there was well-nigh nothing a doctor could do for you before about 1930. Lewis Thomas reports that his doctor father's medicine bag ca. 1910 had quinine, digitalis, and lots of different-colored water.Replies: @J.Ross, @Alden, @Henry Canaday, @Gordo, @YetAnotherAnon
Well gosh, they’ve gone from being suspected of charletanry to respectability to superceding our government and being able to ovetturn our rights based on nothing.
It occurs to very few living people that there once was a time when you might easily die from an infection, and the absurd fetishising of the NHS is a recent development not especially concentrated amongst 100-yr olds.
It’s a combination of government propaganda, partisan politics, the self-interest of millions of NHS workers affecting their judgement, and spare religiosity finding a void to fill.
It’s worth mentioning that among themselves, Brits will exchange horror stories about the incompetent and callous staff at every hospital they’ve ever been at, just as long as nobody extends the criticism to the totemic phrase “NHS” itself – if you do, the programming kicks in, and they start to backpedal.
yes, Meghan had the UK NHS option, and being Canadian she would be familiar with the concept, and not need to stay up half the night google searching for it –a predicament that she faced with the words of the national anthem. I suppose that had she gone to the Canadian embassy they might have issued her a new passport if she had some form of ID–the Palace staff had taken her passport, so with the new Canadian travel documents she could have flown back to Canada.
Harry was already in therapy, but perhaps his self absorption prevented him from detecting his wife’s symptoms. Still, one might think that with the money he inherited from Diana that he could have incentivized his therapist to squeeze Meghan into the schedule.
Therapy is like “equality” in that one can never arrive. There is always “work” to be done. So a “good” therapist retains a customer for life. It is an annuity. Harry assuming the “executive” position with that mental health company will be getting an annuity –he is following on the tradition of the Royals taking rents from enclosed estates where once the peasants freely hunted. But, his brave and lonely fight against privilege inoculates him against criticism
Remember Andrea Yates? AFAICR, the psychiatrist supervising her was never raked over the coals. One of the psychiatrists testifying at her trial tried to stick the bill with an itinerant clergyman the Yates' had once worked for (and whom they hadn't seen in several years) and a mess of idiot newspaper columnists (and said traveling clergyman) tried to stick the bill with her husband. The mental health trade gets plenary indulgences.
Speaking of love, the latest from the NY Times Modern Love column:
It Took Me a Long Time to Come Out as a ‘Plushie’ Lover
As the late talk-radio icon Bob Grant would say, I’m not making this up. I wish I were but I’m not.
Tangential content, including links to vintage radio, including Jean Shepherd, below.
~ ~ ~
Since at least February, Max Schimd has been playing The Zero Hour on his Dustbin of History! radio program. (Broadcast live over WBAI 99.5 FM in New York City, Wednesdays 1:00-3:00 AM; archived here)
Part One of But I Wouldn’t Want to Die There begins just after brief intro at ~5:01 on the June 2nd Dustbin of History! broadcast.
From 1:00:01 until the end of the broadcast: Two lost Jean Shepherd radio broadcasts.
The NHS is the one 'British' thing pretty much all Catholics in the North prefer to the Republic. (Sinn Fein recently put up a pro-NHS wall mural - the first ever 'British' mural on their famous Belfast International Wall, along side other international heroes such as George Floyd & Catalan communists). When I visited a relative at a Belfast hospital in 2018 who was not getting satisfactory treatment the nurse - who had a Gaelic ie Catholic/Nationalist/Republican name - got defensive and pointed out that the patient was lucky he was here as it would be much worse if he were down south where, God help them, they have no NHS. That love of the NHS extends to even those who want to break from the UK is telling.
From an outsider's perspective the whole NHS thing looks like a cult. Based on most statistics I've seen the NHS gets pretty poor results relative to most of the EU when it comes to everything from cancer survival rates to waiting times for minor & major operations. (In the last 20 yrs two of my cousins have ended up having to go private due to having to wait well over a year for knee operations). The UK's covid performance was also pathetic; that seems to have been forgotten now due to being faster on vaccinations. There may have been good reasons to love the NHS back in 1950s but today it's heroic reputation is due to a combination of parochialism (it's an island nation!) and media propaganda.Replies: @J.Ross, @James N. Kennett, @Reg Cæsar
There seems to be a very consistent line in British media about the American standard of living being hell on earth. The Canadians are often more clever and not as constant or clumsy on this, probably because their media couldn’t get away with what the British media attempts. NHS worship is the positive aspect of that same overall scheme.
The blogger is using the word love in loose fashion.
GB’s also love their miserable BBC, post office, and school system.
Actually by 1947 streptomycin, which is the most effective antibiotic treatment for TB was already available. It didn't save George Orwell who was allergic to it but pretty much put an end to the scourge of TB.
The NHS certainly changed life expectancy. My father lost his mother (TB, aged 29), stepmother, father, and stepfather all before he was 18, and my mother lost her father at 21 in 1944.
Then from 1944 to 1982 not a single person died in my family.
My mother, myself, and my 3 sisters all worked for the NHS, and although I left the UK in 1980, I still have an NHS pension of $250 per month, based on 5 years of service from 1975 to 1980.Replies: @dearieme, @Bill Jones, @john cronk, @Random Anonymous, @JMcG
pretty much put an end to the scourge of TB.
True, but I was surprised to learn recently that TB rates in Britain had already declined enormously before the antibiotics finished the job.
If such measures could reduce the spread of TB, I daresay they might be helpful with Covid-19
I had never heard of this sad story before. However, I still put Calvin Coolidge on top of any list of the greatest Presidents of the 20th/21st centuries. As with the show Seinfeld being a show about nothing, “Silent Cal”‘s Presidency was a Presidency about nothing*. That’s the way it OUGHT to be, when you are simply the Administrator of the Executive Branch, not specifically a “leader” and definitely not a King.
Anyway, I can argue about the British NHS another time, but thank you for bringing up the story of Calvin Coolidge’s lost son. Yes, antibiotics were a wonderful discovery/invention.
.
* He did his job nicely in signing the Immigration Restriction Act of 1924!
What has been worse for our great cities? A few Italian mafia Jewish mafia and communists Irish crooked politicians among the masses of cheap labor law abiding immigrants?
Or the Black Plague that destroyed our great cities once in the 20th century and now again in the 21st?
If we hadn’t restricted E European immigration, we’d be a lot blonder, bluer and taller.
And perhaps still live in well designed pre 1945 city homes and we and our kids could use safe convenient public transportation to get around.
Something to think about.Replies: @Achmed E. Newman
Do you know if that was antibiotic resistant? Really not looking forward to the (possible) brave new world of ubiquitous bacteria resistant to all known antibiotics. If we thought the reaction to COVID-19 was bad imagine the return to the pre-antibiotic days accompanied by the risk (in)tolerance of today.
I went for awhile not paying any medical bills at all and they just send them to collections which goes through the motions of calling you a few times. But usually they'll work things out with you.
If your pockets are deep you should probably take precautions to prevent this state of affairs but if your pockets are deep you probably already have or don't need to because you're covered.Replies: @Dr. Krankenschmaltz, @donut, @Bill Jones, @Dan Smith
When I had an MI I had no insurance . I went to the hospital financial assistance office and worked with them and they eventually forgave the whole $6,000 + bill . What was amusing was that they thanked me several times for working with them and at one point some manager came in to thank me as well . I guess most people don’t bother .
I would have thought that there was less oxygen for the healing process.Replies: @Jonathan Mason, @Charlotte, @res
Probably more about:
1. Access to skiing.
2. US athletes congregating at high altitude for training. For example https://coloradosprings.gov/olympic-city-usa
“I do not know why Megan Markle was not able to get psychiatric treatment on the NHS.”
I do not know why you believe this proven–and self-confessed–liar actually sought psychiatric treatment while living in the UK.
Regarding competency of medical staff, an international ranking survey placed the US at number 27, and the UK at number 34. (Japan is number one.)
https://www.nationmaster.com/country-info/stats/Health/Quality-of-health-care-system/Skill-and-competence-of-medical-staff
Regarding fancy Aspen-type surgeons for sports stars, I remember the old anecdote about the chest tube. A prominent politician insisted that the head of surgery come by his room to remove the chest tube. The chief of surgery complied, but then quietly lamented later that he hadn’t removed a chest tube in a decade, whereas the resident had removed perhaps a dozen that day alone.
https://twitter.com/LynchRSP/status/1416041841447866369?s=20
Can confirm
Actually by 1947 streptomycin, which is the most effective antibiotic treatment for TB was already available. It didn't save George Orwell who was allergic to it but pretty much put an end to the scourge of TB.
The NHS certainly changed life expectancy. My father lost his mother (TB, aged 29), stepmother, father, and stepfather all before he was 18, and my mother lost her father at 21 in 1944.
Then from 1944 to 1982 not a single person died in my family.
My mother, myself, and my 3 sisters all worked for the NHS, and although I left the UK in 1980, I still have an NHS pension of $250 per month, based on 5 years of service from 1975 to 1980.Replies: @dearieme, @Bill Jones, @john cronk, @Random Anonymous, @JMcG
Have you calculated what the multiple is of your cost to the NHS since you ceased providing health care to your cost when you did?
It’s not as if people are living forever in the US what with our insane levels of health care spending. Here are the first 30 obituaries from the website of my northeastern hometown’s newspaper, with cause of death if listed and a few interesting notes:
F 79 cancer
F 91
F 59 cancer
M 85
M 67 “struggles with demons that lead to heart disease”
F 80
F 92
F 72 cancer
M 98 [survived many WWII bombing missions over Germany]
M 74
F 49
M 61
F 38
M 58 “died unexpectedly”
M 56
M 66
F 90
M 95
F 75
F 57 [a chef who trained under Gordon Ramsay and Tony Bourdain]
F 89
M 63 [died in hospice unit, so probably cancer]
F 74
M 63
M 71
M 81
F 87
F 61 [possibly mentally disabled]
M 74 sudden death at home
F 73
Average age = 72.6 (72.9 F, 72.3 M). More people (12) died under age 70 than over 80 (10). Also note that the list included no cases of average-lowering infant mortality and no accidental deaths.
Given our huge health care spending, my conclusion is that these results are very, very poor.
I had a co-worker, one I'd dare call a friend, who blew his brains out one Friday morning on his front lawn. His wife spent all of his money (which was very comfortably upper-middle class, borderline upper-class) and got them into debt, and then basically henpecked him to death with astonishing cruelty (even in public) about not earning more money, and he just took it and took it, until apparently he couldn't any longer.
Quoth his obituary: "Died unexpectedly...survived by his loving wife..."
She sure cried like the Missouri at the funeral though.
"An excellent wife is the crown of her husband, but she who brings shame is like rottenness in his bones."
-Proverbs 12:4
I went for awhile not paying any medical bills at all and they just send them to collections which goes through the motions of calling you a few times. But usually they'll work things out with you.
If your pockets are deep you should probably take precautions to prevent this state of affairs but if your pockets are deep you probably already have or don't need to because you're covered.Replies: @Dr. Krankenschmaltz, @donut, @Bill Jones, @Dan Smith
You seem to be treated differently than most; at least financially.
https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/medical-bankruptcy-is-killing-the-american-middle-class-2019-02-14
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/11/10/americans-are-drowning-in-medical-debt-what-to-know-if-you-need-help.html
https://www.gq.com/story/medical-debt-bankruptcies
Actually by 1947 streptomycin, which is the most effective antibiotic treatment for TB was already available. It didn't save George Orwell who was allergic to it but pretty much put an end to the scourge of TB.
The NHS certainly changed life expectancy. My father lost his mother (TB, aged 29), stepmother, father, and stepfather all before he was 18, and my mother lost her father at 21 in 1944.
Then from 1944 to 1982 not a single person died in my family.
My mother, myself, and my 3 sisters all worked for the NHS, and although I left the UK in 1980, I still have an NHS pension of $250 per month, based on 5 years of service from 1975 to 1980.Replies: @dearieme, @Bill Jones, @john cronk, @Random Anonymous, @JMcG
The identical scenario happened to me in 1958 as well, except in the U.S. and the disease was scarlet fever.
My grandpa was very scared of infections. He was always worried I’d go deaf or blind from something or other, such as an earache or scratch. I didn’t understand his concern when I was a little kid, but he was born in 1910 and must have seen a lot of kids die or become disabled by bacterial infections.
But there are still lots of viral infections out there. They still can’t eliminate HIV.
She also boiled her white laundry, in a big tub. Dumped the hot water along with the sheets and underwear into the wringer washer. Then re-used the hot soapy water for the darks. (Drying the clothes on a line in the sun was probably also hygienic.)
1. Access to skiing.
2. US athletes congregating at high altitude for training. For example https://coloradosprings.gov/olympic-city-usaReplies: @Abolish_public_education, @Dan Hayes
A friend with a bad leg traveled to CO (can’t remember which city) in order to consult with the orthopedic guys who fix injured members of the US Ski Team.
Was it the Regennex clinic in Boulder? Did your friend say something about stem cell treatment there or about those orthopedic docs treating professional athletes??
Which, I'm led to believe, is a common occurrence in the States.Replies: @R.G. Camara, @Desiderius, @Redneck farmer, @Bardon Kaldian, @Barnard, @Currahee, @The Alarmist, @Colin Wright, @Harry Baldwin, @Michelle, @sb
Look, the problem is that medicine gets more expensive as it gets more effective. We used to just let people die because nothing could be done for them. That option is fast disappearing, so costs continue to rise.
Americans refuse national health care because they don’t want to pay the expenses of obese cigarette smoking drug addicted drunken POC’s who have no relationship to them whatsoever.
And, had Britain been multicultural in 1947…?
Which, I'm led to believe, is a common occurrence in the States.Replies: @R.G. Camara, @Desiderius, @Redneck farmer, @Bardon Kaldian, @Barnard, @Currahee, @The Alarmist, @Colin Wright, @Harry Baldwin, @Michelle, @sb
To some extent true; in the past they were left to die on gurneys in the hallways, unless they got into a ward, where MRSA was more likely to take them.
Nowadays they are slapped with DNRs if they are over 65 or severely handicapped.
All get COVID toe-tags, while the British public claps and bangs pots.
At one point I was reading about medicine in the late 19th century and early 20th century, and how allopathic medicine (modern evidence-based medicine) was dueling with osteopathic and homeopathic medicine. I was initially shocked at how these latter two could have still been taken seriously at that late date.
But upon reflection, a lot of allopathic medicine did more harm than good. For instance, the treatment for syphilis supposedly withheld from blacks in Tuskegee was a mercury treatment with horrific side effects (and it didn’t cure syphilis anyway; and syphilis just goes away in many cases, something forgotten today when nobody actually toughs out syphilis anymore).
Also, most patients have nothing wrong with them.
Anyway, in light of that, osteopathic and homeopathic medicine were often the best treatment, in that they didn’t do anything, including that they didn’t harm the patient. It was not completely irrational to favor an osteopath or homeopath in those days.
Eventually allopathic medicine lived up to its name for these reasons:
1. Surgery advances that occurred thanks to the Civil War, WWI, WWII, and Vietnam. Surgeons had the opportunity to try a lot of shit they couldn’t get away with in peacetime, and sometimes it panned out.
2. Antibiotics.
I used to have a third thing on this list, but I’ve forgotten it. Vaccines, maybe? Anesthetics?
The pharmaceutical industry, outside of antibiotics, mostly makes products that don’t do much of anything (in terms of life extension), and then they reinvent them when the patents are running out.
A friend who had to get private treatment for a serious ailment says the complete opposite, so your experience may vary. It’s not just the food that’s better at private facilities. Although it has to be said – it *is* hospital food.
Quite possibly, but did not ask; not the time to ask. Her husband indicated that if they’d gotten her in sooner, the doctors could have saved her. Do not know if he was told that or inferred that (accurately or no). They did push what he called ‘high powered’ anti-biotics, but they don’t seem to have contained the shutdown of one organ after another. She’d been ill for weeks, but resistant to seeing a doctor (I think general resistance + COVID concerns); her husband had wanted to take her in, but did not insist. He finally did when he realized one evening that she was disoriented. I think she lasted about four days in the hospital. We were struck dumb when he tells us it started with strep throat. I’d thought it was injuries to the flesh which generated sepsis.
And as a TGIF note:
https://www.infowars.com/posts/video-only-store-not-looted-in-south-african-shopping-mall-is-the-book-shop/
You couldn’t make this shit up.
I went for awhile not paying any medical bills at all and they just send them to collections which goes through the motions of calling you a few times. But usually they'll work things out with you.
If your pockets are deep you should probably take precautions to prevent this state of affairs but if your pockets are deep you probably already have or don't need to because you're covered.Replies: @Dr. Krankenschmaltz, @donut, @Bill Jones, @Dan Smith
You are correct. The liberal trope about medical bankruptcy conflates all bankruptcies, most of which have debts from multiple causes with ones that are strictly medically caused. As you point out, the creditors remain at bay indefinitely. Very rare to have long term consequences. After all, bankruptcy protects debtors. The creditors get pennies on the dollar. Liberals still believe in a Dickensian universe where poor struggling workers are put in debtors prison.
1. Access to skiing.
2. US athletes congregating at high altitude for training. For example https://coloradosprings.gov/olympic-city-usaReplies: @Abolish_public_education, @Dan Hayes
Orthopedic skiing accidents provided the high-altitude patient base!
Drezner never got over (unfairly at the time) being passed over for tenure at UC at the same time they were courting the execrable Leiter. Damn shame. Still doesn’t justify what he’s become.
Our earliest presidents tended to be long-lived. If you look at the crew born between 1780 and 1910, you discover that just two of them lived past 80 and only about 1/3 lived past 70. Lyndon Johnson died at 65, Franklin Roosevelt at 63, Warren Harding at 58, Woodrow Wilson at 67, TR at 60, &c.
Ford, Reagan and GHW Bush all made it into their 90's and Truman nearly did. Of the living presidents, while Obama is still young, Clinton, GW Bush and Trump all are 75 and seem to be doing well, and of course Biden's 78. Jimmy Carter is in a class by himself.
Which, I'm led to believe, is a common occurrence in the States.Replies: @R.G. Camara, @Desiderius, @Redneck farmer, @Bardon Kaldian, @Barnard, @Currahee, @The Alarmist, @Colin Wright, @Harry Baldwin, @Michelle, @sb
‘…Which, I’m led to believe, is a common occurrence in the States.’
Well, probably out of damned foolishness.
Either you don’t have much to lose, or you should have taken precautions. Even back in the pre-Obama care days, it wasn’t too hard.
I’m a case in point! I spent most of my life self-employed, and just ran without health insurance. We paid cash, and had something catastrophic taken place, would have just declared bankruptcy. In point of fact, something catastrophic did take place, and when it did, the medical establishment cut us some slack. They’re inefficient as hell, but they’re not monsters.
However, at some point around age fifty, I realized that (a) I was in possession of some fairly valuable assets, and (b) shit does happen. I did not want to have a heart attack. I mean, one doesn’t want to anyway, but…visions of $250,000 bills dancing in my head.
So we got a plan with a ten thousand dollar deductible — that would cover everything past that. It was remarkably like Obamacare, in fact. In the way of all things, the premium slowly rose over the years, but the last year we had it, for my wife and I it was $260 a month. That’s not chickenfeed, but if you’ve got assets in the first place, you would have been able to afford it, and if you don’t have assets, bankruptcy isn’t that big a deal. Seven years with no credit card — the horror.
It was all morbidly amusing when Obamacare came in. In point of fact, our income was just about the national average — but subsidies meant we only had to pay $2 a month. I didn’t actually need it, but since I had no choice…oh, alright.
So far, so good. But for essentially the same plan an insurer had been able to give us for $260 a month, the government was now paying $778.
Happily, the magic money tree had already been found by then, so no problem. Why not make the insurer rich? People like being rich.
I do not know why Megan Markle was not able to get psychiatric treatment on the NHS.
Maybe she never sought it and her claims in the interview were an exercise in self-dramatization. What business was she in ‘ere she got her talons into Harry?
(While we’re at it, psychiatrists are dandy generators of iatrogenic problems; wouldn’t surprise me if the Queen, Prince Philip, Princess Anne &c told her to do herself a favor and stay away from them).
Here’s the thing.
Apparently, in order to enjoy the fruits of a few key medical advances, like antibiotics, and some heart and cancer treatments, we have to suffer all of the ugliness, monstrosity, poisonous, monotony, noise, filth, pollution, surveillance, extinction, bombbombbombs propaganda, macadammacadammacadem carscarscars, endless faceless suburbs, godawful places of utter emptiness like LA, destruction of all that we hold dear as we grow older.
Because you can’t have penicillin without “Progress,” apparently. They come in a package.
I’ll say it. I want more penicillins and less “Progress”s.
Everyone in Ireland praises their equivalent of the NHS until it comes time to use it. The staff are heavily foreign and heavily incompetent. The private health clinics there are, on the other hand, cheap and fairly good.
Another cousin had an ACL tear repaired privately. It cost 1800.00 euro a few years ago. Another had a hip replacement, also done privately. That was just under 20,000 euro for everything down to the acetaminophen tablets.
Socialized healthcare seems to decay fairly rapidly.Replies: @Steve Sailer, @Jonathan Mason, @slumber_j, @Matra, @Alden
“ Staff are heavily foreign “. Sounds just like America.
A little bar graph with life expectancies in, say, US, UK, Germany, Australia would paint a thousand words on how good the NHS really is.
Anecdote: a private health care provider some years ago in UK had an advert on TV where a woman said she liked private health care as she could choose her doctor and could get “Doctor MCTAVISH” whenever she wanted, we all knew what she meant 😉
Miracle antibiotics are invented by Western Whites.
Being nice people, they give them to the world.
Struggling doctors in shithole countries, dilute doses 50% so they can treat more people.
Struggling doctors in shithole countries, stop treatment when symptoms abate, not completing the dosage regimen, so they can treat more people.
Germs become immune to miracle antibiotics, because they aren’t completely killed off in patients in shithole countries.
People in shithole countries with immune germs get on planes and fly around the world, spreading the immune agents.
Miracle drug no longer works.
When a patient is given antibiotics, small amounts of the drug are expressed in sweat. This encourages harmless bacteria that live on the skin (e.g. Staphylococcus aureus) to develop immunity to the drug (e.g. becoming MRSA, or methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus).
In addition, while your doctor debates whether to give you antibiotics, the same drugs are fed to farm animals as part of their ordinary diet. When an animal is permanently dosed with antibiotics, it is healthier, it puts on more weight, and it incurs fewer vet's bills. Factory farms in particular become breeding grounds for superbugs.Replies: @anon
Where are you getting your information? Private care in the UK, except for little tests that some people pay out for convenience, tends to be exceptional. This is because it is enormously expensive and seems to mostly serve Arab oil sheikhs, billionaires and the Royal family. The very best professors at training hospitals tend to be the ones who "moonlight" and they are paid exceptionally well to dedicate generous time to their patients.
You'd be looking at £20k+ a night, as a medium to long-term patient, in such a facility in London, for the type of cancer that needs constant treatment. Unsurprisingly, the service is incredible.Replies: @James N. Kennett, @Lurker
There are different levels of private care. The top level is extremely expensive. At the lower levels, the local BUPA hospital does surgical operations, but has no ICU. If the patient needs intensive care, the BUPA doctors call an ambulance and send the patient down the road to the NHS hospital. I hope they have to pay to use NHS facilities like this.
Most people cannot afford comprehensive private health care in old age. But private surgery begins to look attractive if you need a cataract operation or hip replacement, and you have savings, and you do not want to spend 2 years on the NHS waiting list.
But there are still lots of viral infections out there. They still can't eliminate HIV.Replies: @Paul Mendez, @Dissident
My grandmother, not much older than your grandpa, was obsessive about hand-washing. She even made us wash our hands before breakfast. When I pointed out our hands couldn’t get dirty sleeping, she replied, “You might have been scratching yourself.”
She also boiled her white laundry, in a big tub. Dumped the hot water along with the sheets and underwear into the wringer washer. Then re-used the hot soapy water for the darks. (Drying the clothes on a line in the sun was probably also hygienic.)
I don't recommend the experience of being there for over a week when you're thirteen and have just found out you have a lifelong life-threatening chronic illness...but if you have to eat hospital food, l'Ospedale Pediatrico Bambino Gesù is a pretty good place to do it.Replies: @Alden
Cedars Sinai hospital in Los Angeles has delicious food. Also the most over priced price gouging hospital in the state. I’ve heard the employees are very well paid.
But there are still lots of viral infections out there. They still can't eliminate HIV.Replies: @Paul Mendez, @Dissident
It might be noted that (in the first-world, at least) the risk of HIV is overwhelmingly limited-to
Similarly, there are quite a few nasty infections that are rarely, if ever, a real concern for anyone other than the sexually licentious. (Granted, a number of individuals are unknowingly placed at risk through unfaithful partners.)
*No form of homosexuality can ever be equivalent to heterosexuality, let alone sacred matrimony. But frot and other non-penetrative forms of homoerotic carnal intimacy at least offer the distinct advantages of not only being extremely safe, but also of neither doing violence to the dignity and masculinity of, nor inflicting pain and other undue burdens upon one of the partners in the way that an act such as buggery does. To say that Gay activists generally react unfavorably to anyone who discourages the latter and promotes the former would be an understatement.
Structural things aside -- setting broken bones, stitching up wounds, etc. -- there was well-nigh nothing a doctor could do for you before about 1930. Lewis Thomas reports that his doctor father's medicine bag ca. 1910 had quinine, digitalis, and lots of different-colored water.Replies: @J.Ross, @Alden, @Henry Canaday, @Gordo, @YetAnotherAnon
Diphtheria was rampant and usually deadly. Until a vaccine was developed in the 1920s and the disease was wiped out during the 1930s.
The NHS is the one 'British' thing pretty much all Catholics in the North prefer to the Republic. (Sinn Fein recently put up a pro-NHS wall mural - the first ever 'British' mural on their famous Belfast International Wall, along side other international heroes such as George Floyd & Catalan communists). When I visited a relative at a Belfast hospital in 2018 who was not getting satisfactory treatment the nurse - who had a Gaelic ie Catholic/Nationalist/Republican name - got defensive and pointed out that the patient was lucky he was here as it would be much worse if he were down south where, God help them, they have no NHS. That love of the NHS extends to even those who want to break from the UK is telling.
From an outsider's perspective the whole NHS thing looks like a cult. Based on most statistics I've seen the NHS gets pretty poor results relative to most of the EU when it comes to everything from cancer survival rates to waiting times for minor & major operations. (In the last 20 yrs two of my cousins have ended up having to go private due to having to wait well over a year for knee operations). The UK's covid performance was also pathetic; that seems to have been forgotten now due to being faster on vaccinations. There may have been good reasons to love the NHS back in 1950s but today it's heroic reputation is due to a combination of parochialism (it's an island nation!) and media propaganda.Replies: @J.Ross, @James N. Kennett, @Reg Cæsar
Theodore Dalrymple (Dr Anthony Daniels) worked in the NHS before he retired. He suggests that worship of the NHS is based on two falsehoods – that before the NHS there was no medical provision for the poor in Britain; and that there is still no such provision in other developed countries.
Canada’s medical system seems to be overwhelmed by Covid. A recent article in the Toronto Sun says 3 million surgeries were posponed due to Covid and it will take more than 3 years to clear the backlog, if you are able to survive without the surgery. I have been on antibiotics at least 6 times, all of which involed infections in my lungs and one in my heart. Thank God for antibiotics.
Presumably beyond being sad, he meant that he was humbled because even being one of the most powerful men in the world he was unable to save his son.
In this very important event the “power and glory of the Presidency” didn’t amount to anything.
(Although if we look at it through a probabilistic lens it is likely that his son benefited from being well fed and his whole life and from the best palliative care available. Though he died, his chances for survival were probably considerably better than an impoverished half-starved poor kid. But his general observation stands)
And now we’re back to long presidential lifespans. Leaving out JFK, Johnson – who never fully recovered from a heart attack in his 40’s and had a dreadful family history – is the only president elected since WWII who died young. Eisenhower (79) and Nixon (81) were the next youngest yet both handily beat life expectancy.
Ford, Reagan and GHW Bush all made it into their 90’s and Truman nearly did.
Of the living presidents, while Obama is still young, Clinton, GW Bush and Trump all are 75 and seem to be doing well, and of course Biden’s 78. Jimmy Carter is in a class by himself.
Which, I'm led to believe, is a common occurrence in the States.Replies: @R.G. Camara, @Desiderius, @Redneck farmer, @Bardon Kaldian, @Barnard, @Currahee, @The Alarmist, @Colin Wright, @Harry Baldwin, @Michelle, @sb
Which, I’m led to believe, is a common occurrence in the States.
There were years before the ACA when I had to cover about $50,000 annually in insurance premiums and medical bills . I’m self-employed, and the only plan we could get had two $10,000 deductibles. In other words, the medical expenses of not one but two members of the family had to exceed $10,000 before all bills were covered. One of our daughters has an expensive chronic medical condition which easily met the $10,000 mark annually, but the rest of the family could have each spent $9,999 without our having achieved full coverage.
We’re not bankrupt, but I had to draw down our retirement savings considerably.
F 91
F 59 cancer
M 85
M 67 "struggles with demons that lead to heart disease"
F 80
F 92
F 72 cancer
M 98 [survived many WWII bombing missions over Germany]
M 74
F 49
M 61
F 38
M 58 "died unexpectedly"
M 56
M 66
F 90
M 95
F 75
F 57 [a chef who trained under Gordon Ramsay and Tony Bourdain]
F 89
M 63 [died in hospice unit, so probably cancer]
F 74
M 63
M 71
M 81
F 87
F 61 [possibly mentally disabled]
M 74 sudden death at home
F 73Average age = 72.6 (72.9 F, 72.3 M). More people (12) died under age 70 than over 80 (10). Also note that the list included no cases of average-lowering infant mortality and no accidental deaths.
Given our huge health care spending, my conclusion is that these results are very, very poor.Replies: @Thea, @Wency
Just a guess but 60% of those deaths are likely related to obesity. This is preventable and not related to health care although it also drives healthcare costs up.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/food/articles/britain_dietReplies: @Thea
Nowadays they are slapped with DNRs if they are over 65 or severely handicapped.
All get COVID toe-tags, while the British public claps and bangs pots.Replies: @Anonymous, @Alexander Turok
Life expectancy – for whites, that is – is higher in the UK than the USA.
Maybe she never sought it and her claims in the interview were an exercise in self-dramatization. What business was she in 'ere she got her talons into Harry?
(While we're at it, psychiatrists are dandy generators of iatrogenic problems; wouldn't surprise me if the Queen, Prince Philip, Princess Anne &c told her to do herself a favor and stay away from them).Replies: @James N. Kennett
Agreed.
Agreed; but Prince Harry favours mental health treatment and would have known how to arrange this if Megan had genuinely needed help.
A chronic medical condition can easily lead to bankruptcy in the U.S. due to loss of income, insurance copays, uncovered services, and just a disruption in the normal lifestyle.
It’s such a good thing many people abuse it. Such as getting several credit cards charging up to the limit and then declaring bankruptcy.
Talk to Drs who run their own practices. They’ll tell you the bills and insurance payments to the providers are imaginary. It’s all a matter if negotiations. The insurance companies don’t want to pay the providers. So they delay and delay. Till the providers are desperate. Then the insurance company offers a smaller amount. The providers accept the smaller amount.
So the providers submit huge bills. The insurance companies refuse to pay. Then negotiations begin. Compromise then a lesser payment.
Or why Drs prefer working as salaried employees for big medical systems.Replies: @guest007
https://twitter.com/FaeceSocietatis/status/1415392972779163650?s=20
(Aren't Blacks lactose-intolerant? Why are there even milk trucks?)Replies: @Not Raul
Would it be accurate to say that, before 1947, everyday life was fraught with more health peril than current life in the midst of “the pandemic”?
- the false sense of safety and protection that antibiotics supposedly provided played out in a Soros like cycle of "reflexivity" as antibiotic resistant strains developed and more vile practices became common. -This charming write up about the "clap doctor" in NYC/Greenwich Village during the 70s & 80s provides some .....anatomically explicit details https://www.virusmyth.org/aids/hiv/bnclapdoctor.htmReplies: @Dissident, @additionalMike
HOW THE RADICAL GAY LEFT CAUSED HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS OF HOMOSEXUALS TO DIE OF AIDS
Harry was already in therapy, but perhaps his self absorption prevented him from detecting his wife's symptoms. Still, one might think that with the money he inherited from Diana that he could have incentivized his therapist to squeeze Meghan into the schedule.
Therapy is like "equality" in that one can never arrive. There is always "work" to be done. So a "good" therapist retains a customer for life. It is an annuity. Harry assuming the "executive" position with that mental health company will be getting an annuity --he is following on the tradition of the Royals taking rents from enclosed estates where once the peasants freely hunted. But, his brave and lonely fight against privilege inoculates him against criticismReplies: @Art Deco, @James N. Kennett
Well there’s that. What you’re describing is time and money wasted. I’ve known people for whom prescriptions from the psychiatrist or internist, visits to the talk therapist, short term hospitalizations, jail time &c. were all just dance steps. They never improved. It was a way of life.
Remember Andrea Yates? AFAICR, the psychiatrist supervising her was never raked over the coals. One of the psychiatrists testifying at her trial tried to stick the bill with an itinerant clergyman the Yates’ had once worked for (and whom they hadn’t seen in several years) and a mess of idiot newspaper columnists (and said traveling clergyman) tried to stick the bill with her husband. The mental health trade gets plenary indulgences.
“I do not know why Megan Markle was not able to get psychiatric treatment”…….sociopathic personality disorder …..it’s untreatable.
Wow. Tragic to discover that right after the wedding! Are you still married?
Anyway, I can argue about the British NHS another time, but thank you for bringing up the story of Calvin Coolidge's lost son. Yes, antibiotics were a wonderful discovery/invention.
.
* He did his job nicely in signing the Immigration Restriction Act of 1924!Replies: @Alden, @Danindc
Lately, as I’ve seen the descendants of the Great Migration reverse gentrification and again destroy the reclaimed sections of our great cities. I’m re thinking the 1924 immigration restriction act.
What has been worse for our great cities? A few Italian mafia Jewish mafia and communists Irish crooked politicians among the masses of cheap labor law abiding immigrants?
Or the Black Plague that destroyed our great cities once in the 20th century and now again in the 21st?
If we hadn’t restricted E European immigration, we’d be a lot blonder, bluer and taller.
And perhaps still live in well designed pre 1945 city homes and we and our kids could use safe convenient public transportation to get around.
Something to think about.
It took a long time to not even fully assimilate all the Jewish E. Euros, the Italians and the Irish (the latter 2 being about there now) to the old values. That was 75 years to a century, but one could say at least 4 decades for an average arrival coming in 1900 to WWII times. Now we've got more absolute numbers and the same percentage of foreigners as the peak then, but they are more extremely foreign. Not only that, but over the last 30 years, they've all been told they don't need to assimilate.
We're screwed, Alden.Replies: @Alden
You would be surprised by how many gay men prefer to just cuddle and stop at third base.
https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/2FYwhX5pKSGTimVy2J4KCyiTyHs=/0x0:250x207/1820x1213/filters:focal(105x84:145x124):format(webp)/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/66769645/Pesa_pallo_field.svg.0.png
Being nice people, they give them to the world.
Struggling doctors in shithole countries, dilute doses 50% so they can treat more people.
Struggling doctors in shithole countries, stop treatment when symptoms abate, not completing the dosage regimen, so they can treat more people.
Germs become immune to miracle antibiotics, because they aren't completely killed off in patients in shithole countries.
People in shithole countries with immune germs get on planes and fly around the world, spreading the immune agents.
Miracle drug no longer works.Replies: @James N. Kennett
I wish that was the only way that antibiotics lose their potency.
When a patient is given antibiotics, small amounts of the drug are expressed in sweat. This encourages harmless bacteria that live on the skin (e.g. Staphylococcus aureus) to develop immunity to the drug (e.g. becoming MRSA, or methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus).
In addition, while your doctor debates whether to give you antibiotics, the same drugs are fed to farm animals as part of their ordinary diet. When an animal is permanently dosed with antibiotics, it is healthier, it puts on more weight, and it incurs fewer vet’s bills. Factory farms in particular become breeding grounds for superbugs.
Go to India. Find a drug plant that makes antibiotics. Take earth samples around the property. If there is a river nearby, sample the mud downstream. See what you find.
Repeat for China.
The world is bigger than US feedlots and chicken factories.
That makes some sense. The NHS cult is truly sickeningly saccherine. Especially since it’s not that good. It is heavily process driven, the doctors and nurses hardly deserve the term “practitioner”. You may as well be talking to a computer script.
And they are so entitled, they’ll rather let little children die than letting them take a chance, however slim, at treatment abroad.
I have two kids with nut allergies. I was really pleased when Joe Manchin’s daughter raised the price of epipens from 30 to 600.00 a couple of years ago. Epipens that were developed by DARPA as an antidote to nerve gas.
Long may she burn in hell.Replies: @slumber_j, @Not Raul
Yeah, that totally sucks: cartoon-level evil. A lot of similar shenanigans go on with insulin pricing in this country…
Anyway, thanks for the kind words.
Makes sense. I remember when I lived out there in the late 80s/early 90s, Cedars Sinai was where all the rich and famous did their hospitalizing.
Harry was already in therapy, but perhaps his self absorption prevented him from detecting his wife's symptoms. Still, one might think that with the money he inherited from Diana that he could have incentivized his therapist to squeeze Meghan into the schedule.
Therapy is like "equality" in that one can never arrive. There is always "work" to be done. So a "good" therapist retains a customer for life. It is an annuity. Harry assuming the "executive" position with that mental health company will be getting an annuity --he is following on the tradition of the Royals taking rents from enclosed estates where once the peasants freely hunted. But, his brave and lonely fight against privilege inoculates him against criticismReplies: @Art Deco, @James N. Kennett
I wouldn’t say that therapy is always pointless, but it is one of the professions that depends on repeat business for its existence. If the patient is lucky enough to sign up for Transactional Analysis (pioneered by Eric Berne, author of Games People Play), the first question he/she will be asked is “Will you allow us to cure you?” The very possibility of a cure means that practitioners of TA are hard to find. The more typical therapist will deny the logical possibility of either diagnosis or cure, and for doing so will be paid weekly in perpetuity, while creating iatrogenic problems that require further attention.
Social workers and related professionals are in a similar racket: they have a vested interest in not solving their clients’ problems. Being “non-judgmental” helps them to avoid confronting issues that are glaringly obvious to other people.
Diet clubs also rely on repeat business. If they actually worked for most people, they would cease to be viable; instead Weight Watchers is a multi-million-dollar global business and is traded on NASDAQ!
Name the common denominator.
Hint: it's the sex of the overwhelming majority of clientele.
You can add in 'superfoods', the Royals, heterosexuals who support the more bizarre LGBTetc stuff, and finger-wagging face-nappy-and-'vaccine' scolds during COVID.
They're very different from us, and as a mass they're observably stupider and far more easily-led.
Some of them are very nice to look at, but frankly that doesn't offset the society-wide damage that is generated when the right to vote meets inherent female gullibility.Replies: @J.Ross
He had a satisfactory life before he married what’s-her-face. He doesn’t need therapy. He needs to put his wife in her place and quit allowing her to drive a wedge between him and the rest of his family. And he needs some sort of employment which does not incorporate promoting philanthropies 240 days a year. Not the job for him.
Actually by 1947 streptomycin, which is the most effective antibiotic treatment for TB was already available. It didn't save George Orwell who was allergic to it but pretty much put an end to the scourge of TB.
The NHS certainly changed life expectancy. My father lost his mother (TB, aged 29), stepmother, father, and stepfather all before he was 18, and my mother lost her father at 21 in 1944.
Then from 1944 to 1982 not a single person died in my family.
My mother, myself, and my 3 sisters all worked for the NHS, and although I left the UK in 1980, I still have an NHS pension of $250 per month, based on 5 years of service from 1975 to 1980.Replies: @dearieme, @Bill Jones, @john cronk, @Random Anonymous, @JMcG
> The NHS certainly changed life expectancy.
Not sure why you attribute that to the NHS specifically as opposed to improvements in medicine generally.
Tangential content, including links to vintage radio, including Jean Shepherd, below.
~ ~ ~
https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/81KkIG66DNL.jpg
I chose the image of the book, Stanton Forbes' But I Wouldn't Want to Die There,for the obvious tangential connection here (i.e., the teddy bear pictured on the book cover). An adaptation of this written work of fiction was one of the five-part serials that were produced for The Zero Hour, an attempted revival of radio drama that aired between 1973 and 1974, and was hosted by Rod Serling of Twilight Zone fame.Since at least February, Max Schimd has been playing The Zero Hour on his Dustbin of History! radio program. (Broadcast live over WBAI 99.5 FM in New York City, Wednesdays 1:00-3:00 AM; archived here)Part One of But I Wouldn't Want to Die There begins just after brief intro at ~5:01 on the June 2nd Dustbin of History! broadcast.From 1:00:01 until the end of the broadcast: Two lost Jean Shepherd radio broadcasts.Replies: @black sea
I once knew a couple whose little dog, Watson, bore a genuine and carnal love for any plushy you tossed his way. It made for a great party trick.
- the false sense of safety and protection that antibiotics supposedly provided played out in a Soros like cycle of "reflexivity" as antibiotic resistant strains developed and more vile practices became common. -This charming write up about the "clap doctor" in NYC/Greenwich Village during the 70s & 80s provides some .....anatomically explicit details https://www.virusmyth.org/aids/hiv/bnclapdoctor.htmReplies: @Dissident, @additionalMike
I will never forget reading a column in the old Village Voice (by, I think, Arthur Bell?) recounting how before a trip to Fire Island, he would gobble penicillin pills with the idea that the drug would somehow ward off the diseases he knew he would catch.
Almost suicidal.
F 91
F 59 cancer
M 85
M 67 "struggles with demons that lead to heart disease"
F 80
F 92
F 72 cancer
M 98 [survived many WWII bombing missions over Germany]
M 74
F 49
M 61
F 38
M 58 "died unexpectedly"
M 56
M 66
F 90
M 95
F 75
F 57 [a chef who trained under Gordon Ramsay and Tony Bourdain]
F 89
M 63 [died in hospice unit, so probably cancer]
F 74
M 63
M 71
M 81
F 87
F 61 [possibly mentally disabled]
M 74 sudden death at home
F 73Average age = 72.6 (72.9 F, 72.3 M). More people (12) died under age 70 than over 80 (10). Also note that the list included no cases of average-lowering infant mortality and no accidental deaths.
Given our huge health care spending, my conclusion is that these results are very, very poor.Replies: @Thea, @Wency
I think “died unexpectedly” is often code for suicide.
I had a co-worker, one I’d dare call a friend, who blew his brains out one Friday morning on his front lawn. His wife spent all of his money (which was very comfortably upper-middle class, borderline upper-class) and got them into debt, and then basically henpecked him to death with astonishing cruelty (even in public) about not earning more money, and he just took it and took it, until apparently he couldn’t any longer.
Quoth his obituary: “Died unexpectedly…survived by his loving wife…”
She sure cried like the Missouri at the funeral though.
“An excellent wife is the crown of her husband, but she who brings shame is like rottenness in his bones.”
-Proverbs 12:4
What has been worse for our great cities? A few Italian mafia Jewish mafia and communists Irish crooked politicians among the masses of cheap labor law abiding immigrants?
Or the Black Plague that destroyed our great cities once in the 20th century and now again in the 21st?
If we hadn’t restricted E European immigration, we’d be a lot blonder, bluer and taller.
And perhaps still live in well designed pre 1945 city homes and we and our kids could use safe convenient public transportation to get around.
Something to think about.Replies: @Achmed E. Newman
Yeah, but Alden, why would an increase in E. Euro or whatever else, immigration have stopped the growth of the black community? They were already here after all. To me what exacerbated almost every black problem in the inner cities was the “Great Society” Socialism introduced in the mid-1960s. Speaking of Presidents, then, I’d put the scumbag Lyndon Johnson down on the list second to none, arguably, of course.
It took a long time to not even fully assimilate all the Jewish E. Euros, the Italians and the Irish (the latter 2 being about there now) to the old values. That was 75 years to a century, but one could say at least 4 decades for an average arrival coming in 1900 to WWII times. Now we’ve got more absolute numbers and the same percentage of foreigners as the peak then, but they are more extremely foreign. Not only that, but over the last 30 years, they’ve all been told they don’t need to assimilate.
We’re screwed, Alden.
There’s not much to admire about the old time WASP north east Puritan culture. In the 19th century it led to the civil war. And unleashed the Black Plague In the 20th century it was the non Jewish section of the CPUSA and all the insane leftist garbage.
They invented wokism 500 years ago. They also dumped the Christian New Testament in favor of the Zionist Old Testament 500 years ago. Which led to first Britain and now the USA being exploited colonies of Israel.
Old time Puritan WASPS established the compulsory tax supported public schools. Look how that turned out.
The Irish Catholics established the private independent parish elementary school in every neighborhood and parish. Very inexpensive and everywhere like post offices. That alone makes the Catholics including the Hispanic and Asian ones infinitely superior to the old time WASP public school brainwashing factories.
Both southern and northern WASPS cared for their black pets far more than they ever cared for their fellow WASPS. Example the southern WASP division into those who consider themselves Gentry and how they despised hillbillies, mill trash and lint heads. Now the factories and mills are closed, the southern Gentry despise the former mill trash and lint heads as drug addicted trailer trash.
Don’t believe the National Review lies that blacks were hard working up right married people raising their children properly till Lyndon Johnson’s welfare came along.
I became a probation officer in 1968. The black criminals were between 20 and 55. Meaning they had been born between 1948 and 1913. Most of their father’s had long criminal records long before the Great Society. 10 percent black county. Criminals were almost all black.
Opinions may vary.Replies: @Art Deco, @Achmed E. Newman
Structural things aside -- setting broken bones, stitching up wounds, etc. -- there was well-nigh nothing a doctor could do for you before about 1930. Lewis Thomas reports that his doctor father's medicine bag ca. 1910 had quinine, digitalis, and lots of different-colored water.Replies: @J.Ross, @Alden, @Henry Canaday, @Gordo, @YetAnotherAnon
“Medicine is a form of courtesy we pay to the aristocracy.”
– Erasmus
Structural things aside -- setting broken bones, stitching up wounds, etc. -- there was well-nigh nothing a doctor could do for you before about 1930. Lewis Thomas reports that his doctor father's medicine bag ca. 1910 had quinine, digitalis, and lots of different-colored water.Replies: @J.Ross, @Alden, @Henry Canaday, @Gordo, @YetAnotherAnon
I read this a few years ago after seeing it recommended on Greg Cochran’s blog. Good book.
The Attlee Government did not create the NHS ex nihilo. Instead it nationalized (without compensation) the municipal and charitable hospitals that already existed. And, in the immortal words of Aneurin Bevan, “stuffed the consultants’ mouths with gold” to ensure their cooperation.
One Labour controlled London Metropolitan Borough (Bermondsey) actually opposed the formation of the NHS because what was on offer would be worse than the municipal health service service it already provided.
So it’s more pesäpallo than baseball. Third base is a long way from home. And it’s not straight!
Structural things aside -- setting broken bones, stitching up wounds, etc. -- there was well-nigh nothing a doctor could do for you before about 1930. Lewis Thomas reports that his doctor father's medicine bag ca. 1910 had quinine, digitalis, and lots of different-colored water.Replies: @J.Ross, @Alden, @Henry Canaday, @Gordo, @YetAnotherAnon
“nothing a doctor could do for you before about 1930”
I’m just reading A.J. Cronin’s (creator of Dr Finlay if you’re a Brit) autobiographical “Adventures In Two Worlds”.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A._J._Cronin
Not quite true. A lot of things which could be cured by antibiotics post-45 could still be attacked by surgery.
His first call out in the 20s as a general practitioner was to a boy dying of diptheria, he had to perform a tracheotomy by candlelight on a kitchen table. On another occasion he operated in similar conditions on a girl with acute suppurative mastoiditis, worrying about cutting too deep and killing her, uncomfortably aware of her father, demented with worry and with a reputation for mania, watching him closely.
On the other hand he had to watch people fading away with TB.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sKjHvpiHk3s
Salaries in Singapore are equal to American salaries.
Singapore has the best government in the world.Replies: @Dacian Julien Soros, @slumber_j
I find it hard to believe that Singaporeans have high wages or superior health care, because you need racial homogeneity for those things. /s
And your point is . . . ?
There is some segment of the population – I estimate 20-30% – who want people controlled.
FREEDOM MUST BE STOPPED!
The state controlling medical care with absolute authority makes them happy.
My biological grandfather died of pneumonia when my dad was a baby in 1926. I’d probably be a different person today had my dad been raised by him instead of a couple of step-dads.
The NHS is the one 'British' thing pretty much all Catholics in the North prefer to the Republic. (Sinn Fein recently put up a pro-NHS wall mural - the first ever 'British' mural on their famous Belfast International Wall, along side other international heroes such as George Floyd & Catalan communists). When I visited a relative at a Belfast hospital in 2018 who was not getting satisfactory treatment the nurse - who had a Gaelic ie Catholic/Nationalist/Republican name - got defensive and pointed out that the patient was lucky he was here as it would be much worse if he were down south where, God help them, they have no NHS. That love of the NHS extends to even those who want to break from the UK is telling.
From an outsider's perspective the whole NHS thing looks like a cult. Based on most statistics I've seen the NHS gets pretty poor results relative to most of the EU when it comes to everything from cancer survival rates to waiting times for minor & major operations. (In the last 20 yrs two of my cousins have ended up having to go private due to having to wait well over a year for knee operations). The UK's covid performance was also pathetic; that seems to have been forgotten now due to being faster on vaccinations. There may have been good reasons to love the NHS back in 1950s but today it's heroic reputation is due to a combination of parochialism (it's an island nation!) and media propaganda.Replies: @J.Ross, @James N. Kennett, @Reg Cæsar
Thanks. The boys and I were stuck for a name for our latest garage band.
Do you realize that bankruptcy is a way of debtors getting rid of debt they can’t or don’t want to pay? Bankruptcy is a good thing for many people especially small businesses.
It’s such a good thing many people abuse it. Such as getting several credit cards charging up to the limit and then declaring bankruptcy.
Talk to Drs who run their own practices. They’ll tell you the bills and insurance payments to the providers are imaginary. It’s all a matter if negotiations. The insurance companies don’t want to pay the providers. So they delay and delay. Till the providers are desperate. Then the insurance company offers a smaller amount. The providers accept the smaller amount.
So the providers submit huge bills. The insurance companies refuse to pay. Then negotiations begin. Compromise then a lesser payment.
Or why Drs prefer working as salaried employees for big medical systems.
Second, virtually all physicians generate their own fees, even when they are associated with big medical systems. I know since I have work for more than one. Some types of physicians have learned how to deal with the insurance companies by creating large practices. A good example would be an orthopedic practice that includes a large portion of the orthopedic surgeons in an area. Any insurance company wanting to offer insurance in that area has to do business with the big ortho practice. It is the same reason that there are now large health systems. If insurance companies have to do business with the largest provider in a geographic area especially if the biggest provider is the only one offering something expensive such as proton therapy.Replies: @Art Deco
Nowadays they are slapped with DNRs if they are over 65 or severely handicapped.
All get COVID toe-tags, while the British public claps and bangs pots.Replies: @Anonymous, @Alexander Turok
Of course, because, what government doesn’t want to report a lot more COVID-deaths than actually occur?
The usual choice of oral or suppository. D’you fancy a crumpet?
Johann, years ago I was injured on a job, falling about 28 feet to the concrete. I spent 16 days in the hospital. At first too injured to eat I skipped meals. Later I found the food to be not my liking. I was visited by the dietican who asked what I would like to eat. Dinner that night was a great rueben sandwich and with the doctor’s approval, an occasional beer. Kenmore Mercy hospital run by the Sisters of Mercy. Nice ladies. KMH is one of at least four hospitals in Buffalo founded by nuns.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sKjHvpiHk3s
Salaries in Singapore are equal to American salaries.
Singapore has the best government in the world.Replies: @Dacian Julien Soros, @slumber_j
Joke’s on us!
Steve’s witty headline (with implied comma between S and Love) is brilliant, and I mean that most sincere.
Some comments from an Irish doctor who works in both the Republic (non-NHS) and Northern Ireland (pedantically also not the NHS given that healthcare is devolved, it is rather something called the HSC, but pragmatically, for this discussion, it is the NHS):
— Outcomes are comparable between the two jurisdictions. People in the Republic live slightly longer in slightly better health; but almost everyone with experience of both jurisdictions prefers the NHS.
— The more we learn about health on a population level, the cheaper the interventions get. Getting the population to not smoke is much cheaper than dealing with the myocardial infarctions and lung cancers that will arise in an appreciable proportion of those who smoke.
Implementing the marketing and agricultural incentives to have people not be obese is much cheaper than paying for the knee replacements and the polypharmacy of dealing with type 2 diabetes, and the home supports to have meals delivered to people who can’t make it to the kitchen to cook because of their body mass index of 70 kg/m².
Statins and blood pressure control are cheaper (especially for the exchequer in our mixed system where many people pay for their drugs) than rehab for debilitating strokes or emergent stents for STEMIs.
Vaccinations are cheap, cheap, cheap and very effective.
The most bang for the buck is in this sort of population-level intervention, and this would be even more true if you could amortise it across the population of the US (320 million!).
— Unintuitively for most people, the next most effective intervention is likely an available, affable and able primary care physician. https://www.globalfamilydoctor.com/InternationalIssues/BarbaraStarfield.aspx . Most people are terrible at judging the possible underlying severity of any symptom, and it turns out, if they can see a doctor soon and without fuss for almost anything, it seems to make them live longer.
— Secondary care (the hospitals) comes next after this. The North and the Republic are reasonably comparable in the above two. They are much less comparable in secondary care, and this comes down to differing political will. In order of most pleasant to least pleasant interactions for patients:
A huge thing I admire about the NHS is NICE, the National Institute for Clinical Excellence. They have spent the money to sit down, hash out, and come to a freely-available conclusion on many questions that twenty years ago would have required the input and the interaction from consultant, a specialist.
Both jurisdictions do the wrong thing in terms of how to direct resources for an individual patient. The German and Dutch model of regulated, private insurance, a »gesetzliche Krankenkasse« that you pay yourself and that is covered by the government once you are unemployed or retired is the correct model; it means that resources follow the sick patient, and the waiting lists that are the scourge of the Irish model (and, but less so, of the NHS model) don’t arise, because suddenly it makes more financial sense for an orthopaedic surgeon to do more hips or knees on Saturday or of an evening.
Much like their vaunted BBC and police force, which assists child molesters like Jimmy Saville and Muslim rapists and pimps In Rotherham and punished people who accused them.
Britain is a dystopia with a cheeky accent and some good pr. Slaves.Replies: @Not Raul
So, you know more about the NHS than the Brits?
https://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2009/12/09/article-1234276-078644B1000005DC-334_468x316.jpg
It took a long time to not even fully assimilate all the Jewish E. Euros, the Italians and the Irish (the latter 2 being about there now) to the old values. That was 75 years to a century, but one could say at least 4 decades for an average arrival coming in 1900 to WWII times. Now we've got more absolute numbers and the same percentage of foreigners as the peak then, but they are more extremely foreign. Not only that, but over the last 30 years, they've all been told they don't need to assimilate.
We're screwed, Alden.Replies: @Alden
Ever lived in a Polish neighborhood or suburb? A son did for a few years. He was enthralled with the Polish Goddesses as he called them.
There’s not much to admire about the old time WASP north east Puritan culture. In the 19th century it led to the civil war. And unleashed the Black Plague In the 20th century it was the non Jewish section of the CPUSA and all the insane leftist garbage.
They invented wokism 500 years ago. They also dumped the Christian New Testament in favor of the Zionist Old Testament 500 years ago. Which led to first Britain and now the USA being exploited colonies of Israel.
Old time Puritan WASPS established the compulsory tax supported public schools. Look how that turned out.
The Irish Catholics established the private independent parish elementary school in every neighborhood and parish. Very inexpensive and everywhere like post offices. That alone makes the Catholics including the Hispanic and Asian ones infinitely superior to the old time WASP public school brainwashing factories.
Both southern and northern WASPS cared for their black pets far more than they ever cared for their fellow WASPS. Example the southern WASP division into those who consider themselves Gentry and how they despised hillbillies, mill trash and lint heads. Now the factories and mills are closed, the southern Gentry despise the former mill trash and lint heads as drug addicted trailer trash.
Don’t believe the National Review lies that blacks were hard working up right married people raising their children properly till Lyndon Johnson’s welfare came along.
I became a probation officer in 1968. The black criminals were between 20 and 55. Meaning they had been born between 1948 and 1913. Most of their father’s had long criminal records long before the Great Society. 10 percent black county. Criminals were almost all black.
Opinions may vary.
I do get your point that the E. European immigrants IYO would not put up with as much crap. They'd still be here. Would integration not have happened? I don't know.
That was Vail, not Aspen. The Steadman Clinic I believe.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trinidad,_Colorado#Recent
He made this town the world’s ‘sex-change capital,’ but he’s not honored hereReplies: @Rob McX, @anon
I have two kids with nut allergies. I was really pleased when Joe Manchin’s daughter raised the price of epipens from 30 to 600.00 a couple of years ago. Epipens that were developed by DARPA as an antidote to nerve gas.
Long may she burn in hell.Replies: @slumber_j, @Not Raul
So, you’re having second thoughts about capitalism?
OT: WHO admits to errors made about the origins of Covid-Chan after WaPo asks questions.
“If they die, they die!”
https://twitter.com/godclosemyeyes/status/1414619671056297984Replies: @Golbat
The book is fairly expensive to acquire but it can be borrowed from archive.org. A PDF copy has just been uploaded to the Z-library.
The UK has a high obesity rate, too.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/food/articles/britain_diet
So you are saying someone is cooking up a Black Holodomor?
(Aren’t Blacks lactose-intolerant? Why are there even milk trucks?)
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/africans-ability-digest-milk-came-livestock-agriculture-180950064/
Hobnobs, usually.
https://www.infowars.com/posts/video-only-store-not-looted-in-south-african-shopping-mall-is-the-book-shop/
You couldn't make this shit up.Replies: @XBardon Kaldlan
How about the pharmacy. How did it do?
If you haven’t noticed, most Western governments have been ovserstating COVID deaths, hospitalisations, and cases. It’s how they’ve justified the continued reign of terror. My UK colleagues hoped we could all meet again in person in Sepember, but no sooner had we gotten off that call than TPTB were talking up another possible lockdown in as early as five weeks.
Can someone make an argument for what "they" achieve with all the lockdowns? Don't say the goal is "control," that's just a tautology. It would make sense, for instance, if they shut down private schools but kept public schools open. But in reality, they're doing the opposite.Replies: @J.Ross
Seems plausible enough.
In the US, an example of misplaced credit is the labor unions taking credit for high wages and the 8-hour work day, when what really deserves the credit is restrictive immigration policy that made labor scarce and therefore dear.
It was a long time ago. Nowadays the public schools teach the 1924 immigration restrictions as an outburst of anti Semitic and racism. And how dare those uneducated hillbillies and dirty Micks use their votes to obtain immigration restrictions leading to decent wages and working conditions.
Shhh Don’t tell the progressive scum of San Francisco about Kearney. They’ll change the name of the street and tear down his statue.
“[Coolidge] was at the top of his profession, having won election as President …”
A nit, but in 1924 Coolidge had not yet won an election as President. He had recently taken over from Harding, but the 1924 election (which Coolidge did win) had not happened when his son died.
Brits tend to be fairly self-satisfied and uncritical about the NHS. Americans always think the grass is greener on the other side. It’s probably why so much path-breaking tech tends to come out from the New World. If you’re always restless and dissatisfied, there is continuous impetus towards changing the way things are done. Anyhow, a Daily Mail graphic re relative survival rates for several serious illnesses, courtesy of Twinkie:
A nit, but in 1924 Coolidge had not yet won an election as President. He had recently taken over from Harding, but the 1924 election (which Coolidge did win) had not happened when his son died.Replies: @Steve Sailer
President Coolidge had just won the GOP nomination at the convention, putting him on the road to an easy win in November, when his son died.
Anyway, I can argue about the British NHS another time, but thank you for bringing up the story of Calvin Coolidge's lost son. Yes, antibiotics were a wonderful discovery/invention.
.
* He did his job nicely in signing the Immigration Restriction Act of 1924!Replies: @Alden, @Danindc
What a great President. Amity Schlaes wrote a good book about him. A redhead! He and Jefferson. Arguably the 2 best. I think redheads are now excluded from power after the South Park episodes.
Yeah, I can't argue with those 2 being the best without doing a lot more reading. That reading wouldn't be necessary for any 20th/21st century guys though. How about James Madison or Andy Jackson?
.
* See, people, my links are there for a reason! ;-}
Anybody who would say such an absurd thing must never have been a parent, and must know nothing about history, or science, or the present state of the healthcare racket.
Which, I'm led to believe, is a common occurrence in the States.Replies: @R.G. Camara, @Desiderius, @Redneck farmer, @Bardon Kaldian, @Barnard, @Currahee, @The Alarmist, @Colin Wright, @Harry Baldwin, @Michelle, @sb
It is true. Even visitors to the UK can suffer catastrophic injuries and be treated at no cost. When falling off your bike and bumping your head or breaking an arm in San Francisco can result in tens of thousands of dollars of debt.
It's not just in institutional food that Italy excels, there is a 'La Dolce Vita' sensibility in the most surprising parts of Italian society. I used to deal in military surplus as a side gig and the quality/luxury of some Italian surplus was astounding. The Italian Air Force had some Rosenthal quality espresso sets, fine linen tablecloths etc. I still have a couple of navy uniforms I converted to civilian suits ( just a matter of replacing gold buttons) that are comparable to Corneliani et al in quality of material , cut and tailoring. I'm sure a lot of this is driven by corruption of one sort or another,which is endemic in Italy, but it is remarkable nonetheless and can result in very pleasant surprises.Replies: @JMcG, @Dissident
Had learned circa 2014 that Italy restricted surrogate motherhood and perhaps other reproductive technologies to married heterosexual couples. Then learned from Radio Derb in March 2015 that Dolce & Gabanna had expressed sentiments very consistent with said legal restrictions. Passed by D&G store on NYC’s Madison Ave., contemplated going in and praising such courageous expression of dissident thought, but ultimately did not go in. Then learned that D&G had eventually folded like cheap cameras and apologized.
Tangentially related photo below.
In the US, an example of misplaced credit is the labor unions taking credit for high wages and the 8-hour work day, when what really deserves the credit is restrictive immigration policy that made labor scarce and therefore dear.Replies: @Alden, @Art Deco
You’re right. But don’t forget that labor leaders like the great White Labor hero Dennis Kearney and another, Samuel Gompers advocated immigration restriction 20 years before the 1924 law.
It was a long time ago. Nowadays the public schools teach the 1924 immigration restrictions as an outburst of anti Semitic and racism. And how dare those uneducated hillbillies and dirty Micks use their votes to obtain immigration restrictions leading to decent wages and working conditions.
Shhh Don’t tell the progressive scum of San Francisco about Kearney. They’ll change the name of the street and tear down his statue.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/food/articles/britain_dietReplies: @Thea
Yikes. It appears obesity, like wokeness and sexual deviancy, is contagious and spread across the pond
To be honest, no I don’t believe a word of it.
I don’t think anybody else does either, because nobody seems to be taking her remarks as an attack on the British Healthcare system.
I maintain that if her husband had taken her to the nearest emergency room she would at least have been assessed by a psychiatric resident, and would have been given a follow-up appointment.
Given the prosperous state of the patient’s family, the doctor might well have asked her husband to appoint a footman or maid, or more likely hired agency nurse to sit with her if she was deemed to be seriously suicidal, or suffering from one of the depressive disorders of pregnancy.
Nobody, even those who defend her, seems to have taken her claims of being suicidal in the slightest bit seriously.
If they did, they would have to be questions asked about why her husband who has been a spokesperson for mental health for years, did not intervene on her behalf.
Equally, although it is well known that Prince Harry is a basket case who has suffered from anger management disorders, and intermittent binge drinking and drug use, no one seems to connect this with the possibility of post-traumatic stress syndrome as a result of his spells as an attack helicopter gun operator, who admitted in a interview with The Guardian that he had killed Afghanis during his course of duty, and that the Afghanis had put a bounty on his head.
The whole royal tabloid obsession is simply news factory-produced pablum for the proles, and preferably it bears little to reality or everyday life.
and intermittent binge drinking
He's young and British.
They'd have put a bounty on his head anyway, because as a totem of the British tribe, knocking him off would have been a big propaganda victory.
"admitted in a interview with The Guardian that he had killed Afghanis during his course of duty"
How much did his training and a helicopter gunship cost?http://www.kiplingsociety.co.uk/poems_arith.htm
Related:
It’s such a good thing many people abuse it. Such as getting several credit cards charging up to the limit and then declaring bankruptcy.
Talk to Drs who run their own practices. They’ll tell you the bills and insurance payments to the providers are imaginary. It’s all a matter if negotiations. The insurance companies don’t want to pay the providers. So they delay and delay. Till the providers are desperate. Then the insurance company offers a smaller amount. The providers accept the smaller amount.
So the providers submit huge bills. The insurance companies refuse to pay. Then negotiations begin. Compromise then a lesser payment.
Or why Drs prefer working as salaried employees for big medical systems.Replies: @guest007
First, as Elizabeth Warren published more than ten years ago, most personal backruptcy are due to illness, substance abuse, and divorce.
Second, virtually all physicians generate their own fees, even when they are associated with big medical systems. I know since I have work for more than one. Some types of physicians have learned how to deal with the insurance companies by creating large practices. A good example would be an orthopedic practice that includes a large portion of the orthopedic surgeons in an area. Any insurance company wanting to offer insurance in that area has to do business with the big ortho practice. It is the same reason that there are now large health systems. If insurance companies have to do business with the largest provider in a geographic area especially if the biggest provider is the only one offering something expensive such as proton therapy.
No, she made reference to studies which showed that x% of bankruptcy filers had medical debts. She didn't demonstrate the medical debts were the cause of the bankruptcy. (IIRC, the mean value of the medical debt in the principal study she consulted was around $18,000)Replies: @guest007
Whatever you do, don’t fly into Trinidad by mistake!
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trinidad,_Colorado#Recent
He made this town the world’s ‘sex-change capital,’ but he’s not honored here
There’s not much to admire about the old time WASP north east Puritan culture. In the 19th century it led to the civil war. And unleashed the Black Plague In the 20th century it was the non Jewish section of the CPUSA and all the insane leftist garbage.
They invented wokism 500 years ago. They also dumped the Christian New Testament in favor of the Zionist Old Testament 500 years ago. Which led to first Britain and now the USA being exploited colonies of Israel.
Old time Puritan WASPS established the compulsory tax supported public schools. Look how that turned out.
The Irish Catholics established the private independent parish elementary school in every neighborhood and parish. Very inexpensive and everywhere like post offices. That alone makes the Catholics including the Hispanic and Asian ones infinitely superior to the old time WASP public school brainwashing factories.
Both southern and northern WASPS cared for their black pets far more than they ever cared for their fellow WASPS. Example the southern WASP division into those who consider themselves Gentry and how they despised hillbillies, mill trash and lint heads. Now the factories and mills are closed, the southern Gentry despise the former mill trash and lint heads as drug addicted trailer trash.
Don’t believe the National Review lies that blacks were hard working up right married people raising their children properly till Lyndon Johnson’s welfare came along.
I became a probation officer in 1968. The black criminals were between 20 and 55. Meaning they had been born between 1948 and 1913. Most of their father’s had long criminal records long before the Great Society. 10 percent black county. Criminals were almost all black.
Opinions may vary.Replies: @Art Deco, @Achmed E. Newman
I get the impression from your posts that you are never sober.
If he were an actual basket case, he’d have been discharged from the military.
and intermittent binge drinking
He’s young and British.
Actually by 1947 streptomycin, which is the most effective antibiotic treatment for TB was already available. It didn't save George Orwell who was allergic to it but pretty much put an end to the scourge of TB.
The NHS certainly changed life expectancy. My father lost his mother (TB, aged 29), stepmother, father, and stepfather all before he was 18, and my mother lost her father at 21 in 1944.
Then from 1944 to 1982 not a single person died in my family.
My mother, myself, and my 3 sisters all worked for the NHS, and although I left the UK in 1980, I still have an NHS pension of $250 per month, based on 5 years of service from 1975 to 1980.Replies: @dearieme, @Bill Jones, @john cronk, @Random Anonymous, @JMcG
My Irish mother, may she Rest In Peace, did her nursing training in England. I think, given her druthers, she’d have stayed there rather than coming to the US. She went on to work at St. Anthony’s Clinic in London and cared for Petula Clarke and Elizabeth Taylor. She too had a pension from the crown until her death. A much more civilized world.
In the US, an example of misplaced credit is the labor unions taking credit for high wages and the 8-hour work day, when what really deserves the credit is restrictive immigration policy that made labor scarce and therefore dear.Replies: @Alden, @Art Deco
The decline in weekly working hours in this country occurred between 1900 and 1920, before immigration restriction went into effect.
https://eh.net/encyclopedia/hours-of-work-in-u-s-history/
I see the biggest drop occurring after, though it's hard to disentangle the effect of the Great Depression.
In any event, the landmark federal law that mandated an 8-hour day came in 1937.
But upon reflection, a lot of allopathic medicine did more harm than good. For instance, the treatment for syphilis supposedly withheld from blacks in Tuskegee was a mercury treatment with horrific side effects (and it didn't cure syphilis anyway; and syphilis just goes away in many cases, something forgotten today when nobody actually toughs out syphilis anymore).
Also, most patients have nothing wrong with them.
Anyway, in light of that, osteopathic and homeopathic medicine were often the best treatment, in that they didn't do anything, including that they didn't harm the patient. It was not completely irrational to favor an osteopath or homeopath in those days.
Eventually allopathic medicine lived up to its name for these reasons:
1. Surgery advances that occurred thanks to the Civil War, WWI, WWII, and Vietnam. Surgeons had the opportunity to try a lot of shit they couldn't get away with in peacetime, and sometimes it panned out.
2. Antibiotics.
I used to have a third thing on this list, but I've forgotten it. Vaccines, maybe? Anesthetics?
The pharmaceutical industry, outside of antibiotics, mostly makes products that don't do much of anything (in terms of life extension), and then they reinvent them when the patents are running out.Replies: @JMcG
I e never heard that syphilis just goes away. Do you have a source? Not trolling, genuinely curious.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trinidad,_Colorado#Recent
He made this town the world’s ‘sex-change capital,’ but he’s not honored hereReplies: @Rob McX, @anon
This Australian electrician moonlighted as a sex change surgeon.
Most people cannot afford comprehensive private health care in old age. But private surgery begins to look attractive if you need a cataract operation or hip replacement, and you have savings, and you do not want to spend 2 years on the NHS waiting list.Replies: @JMcG
Yes, a cousin had a hip replaced at a private clinic in Ireland for just under 20,000 Euros all-inclusive. That would be an easy 75,000 dollars here and, realistically, far more than that.
True, but I was surprised to learn recently that TB rates in Britain had already declined enormously before the antibiotics finished the job.Replies: @Jonathan Mason
Yes I did because there were a lot of hygiene measures that were taken such as social distancing, and not having people in institutions sleeping a few inches apart.
If such measures could reduce the spread of TB, I daresay they might be helpful with Covid-19
lol. What kind of idiot logic is that. “How dare you think you can argue against British socialized deathcare!”
The typical post world war ii boomer has a brain beset by all sort of phantasms the worst the fear of an intellect greater than their own opposed to their own love of of the collective wisdom of the combined forces of capitalism. Should a big tech pharma like Pfizer seek indemnity from adverse reactions then the likes of your stock standard Boomer demands government act on the collective and grant them immunity on the collective’s behalf….
Run-on sentences = run-on cognition. George Orwell said something similar to that.
A friend with a bad leg traveled to CO (can’t remember which city) in order to consult with the orthopedic guys who fix injured members of the US Ski Team.
Was it the Regennex clinic in Boulder? Did your friend say something about stem cell treatment there or about those orthopedic docs treating professional athletes??
Psycho-charlatanry, weight loss clubs, astrology, tarot, palmistry, ‘The Secret’, ‘dream catchers’, crystals, daytime television (from soap operas to Dr Phil and various judges).
Name the common denominator.
Hint: it’s the sex of the overwhelming majority of clientele.
You can add in ‘superfoods’, the Royals, heterosexuals who support the more bizarre LGBTetc stuff, and finger-wagging face-nappy-and-‘vaccine’ scolds during COVID.
They’re very different from us, and as a mass they’re observably stupider and far more easily-led.
Some of them are very nice to look at, but frankly that doesn’t offset the society-wide damage that is generated when the right to vote meets inherent female gullibility.
Coincidentally enough, Calvin’s older son John lived until the ripe old age of 95, not dying until 2000. Oddly enough, the father’s legal name was John Calvin Coolidge, Jr., but his older son’s name was John and the younger son’s name was Calvin, Jr.!
Let's make the rule retroactive too.Replies: @Hank Archer, @Thomm
I fully agree. Let’s limit access to antibiotics to people with IQs above 130.
If this selection criteria results in too few women selected, then the selected men will each get to choose ONE woman to whom access will be granted until access has a 50/50 gender balance. Invariably, only the most attractive women will be chosen.
Hence, after this project, the only people with access will be men with 130+ IQs, the few women with 130+ IQs, and the most attractive women.
That is an awesome plan!
Heh heh heh heh
Everybody’s fat but the Duchess of Cambridge.
Ha, that’s what my link above was, Dan – a short discussion of Mrs. Schlaes book Coolidge*. The post even has a video (really just audio with a picture of Mrs. Schlaes in cute mode) that has survived over 3 years at the same youtube link.
Yeah, I can’t argue with those 2 being the best without doing a lot more reading. That reading wouldn’t be necessary for any 20th/21st century guys though. How about James Madison or Andy Jackson?
.
* See, people, my links are there for a reason! ;-}
There’s not much to admire about the old time WASP north east Puritan culture. In the 19th century it led to the civil war. And unleashed the Black Plague In the 20th century it was the non Jewish section of the CPUSA and all the insane leftist garbage.
They invented wokism 500 years ago. They also dumped the Christian New Testament in favor of the Zionist Old Testament 500 years ago. Which led to first Britain and now the USA being exploited colonies of Israel.
Old time Puritan WASPS established the compulsory tax supported public schools. Look how that turned out.
The Irish Catholics established the private independent parish elementary school in every neighborhood and parish. Very inexpensive and everywhere like post offices. That alone makes the Catholics including the Hispanic and Asian ones infinitely superior to the old time WASP public school brainwashing factories.
Both southern and northern WASPS cared for their black pets far more than they ever cared for their fellow WASPS. Example the southern WASP division into those who consider themselves Gentry and how they despised hillbillies, mill trash and lint heads. Now the factories and mills are closed, the southern Gentry despise the former mill trash and lint heads as drug addicted trailer trash.
Don’t believe the National Review lies that blacks were hard working up right married people raising their children properly till Lyndon Johnson’s welfare came along.
I became a probation officer in 1968. The black criminals were between 20 and 55. Meaning they had been born between 1948 and 1913. Most of their father’s had long criminal records long before the Great Society. 10 percent black county. Criminals were almost all black.
Opinions may vary.Replies: @Art Deco, @Achmed E. Newman
No, Alden, I don’t believe too much of anything National Review has to say. However, though black people had less stable lifestyles, more criminality, and more self-induced problems than White people, Socialism is dysgenic. It brings out the worst, and it brings up the numbers of the most irresponsible genetically.
I do get your point that the E. European immigrants IYO would not put up with as much crap. They’d still be here. Would integration not have happened? I don’t know.
Nah, excess deaths exceed reported COVID deaths.
Can someone make an argument for what “they” achieve with all the lockdowns? Don’t say the goal is “control,” that’s just a tautology. It would make sense, for instance, if they shut down private schools but kept public schools open. But in reality, they’re doing the opposite.
Calvin Jr. died while the Democratic National Convention was in session. Out of respect, the Democrats adjourned the proceedings for a day.
When it comes to a new president and family tragedy, Coolidge got off far easier than Franklin Pierce. As president elect, a couple of months prior to the inauguration, Pierce was in a train wreck with his wife and his son Benjamin, who at age 11 was the only one of their three children to survive early childhood. Benjamin was crushed to death and nearly beheaded right in front of his parents. Pierce spent his term in office struggling with depression and alcohol. He drank himself to death at age 64.
(Aren't Blacks lactose-intolerant? Why are there even milk trucks?)Replies: @Not Raul
A lot of them aren’t.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/africans-ability-digest-milk-came-livestock-agriculture-180950064/
When a patient is given antibiotics, small amounts of the drug are expressed in sweat. This encourages harmless bacteria that live on the skin (e.g. Staphylococcus aureus) to develop immunity to the drug (e.g. becoming MRSA, or methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus).
In addition, while your doctor debates whether to give you antibiotics, the same drugs are fed to farm animals as part of their ordinary diet. When an animal is permanently dosed with antibiotics, it is healthier, it puts on more weight, and it incurs fewer vet's bills. Factory farms in particular become breeding grounds for superbugs.Replies: @anon
I wish that was the only way that antibiotics lose their potency.
Go to India. Find a drug plant that makes antibiotics. Take earth samples around the property. If there is a river nearby, sample the mud downstream. See what you find.
Repeat for China.
The world is bigger than US feedlots and chicken factories.
Cal Coolidge was a great man, a tremendous POTUS.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trinidad,_Colorado#Recent
He made this town the world’s ‘sex-change capital,’ but he’s not honored hereReplies: @Rob McX, @anon
Whatever you do, don’t fly into Trinidad by mistake!
There is no commercial service to Perry Stokes airport.
Am I the only one getting tired of Car Grease’s little sexual obsessions?
Where are you getting your information? Private care in the UK, except for little tests that some people pay out for convenience, tends to be exceptional. This is because it is enormously expensive and seems to mostly serve Arab oil sheikhs, billionaires and the Royal family. The very best professors at training hospitals tend to be the ones who "moonlight" and they are paid exceptionally well to dedicate generous time to their patients.
You'd be looking at £20k+ a night, as a medium to long-term patient, in such a facility in London, for the type of cancer that needs constant treatment. Unsurprisingly, the service is incredible.Replies: @James N. Kennett, @Lurker
My vague understanding there is flow back and forth. Sometimes private providers will pay for the use of some NHS facilities, equipment or whatever. And the NHS will use services, facilities from the private sector. Its all a bit messier than a clear cut private/public split.
Second, virtually all physicians generate their own fees, even when they are associated with big medical systems. I know since I have work for more than one. Some types of physicians have learned how to deal with the insurance companies by creating large practices. A good example would be an orthopedic practice that includes a large portion of the orthopedic surgeons in an area. Any insurance company wanting to offer insurance in that area has to do business with the big ortho practice. It is the same reason that there are now large health systems. If insurance companies have to do business with the largest provider in a geographic area especially if the biggest provider is the only one offering something expensive such as proton therapy.Replies: @Art Deco
First, as Elizabeth Warren published more than ten years ago, most personal backruptcy are due to illness, substance abuse, and divorce.
No, she made reference to studies which showed that x% of bankruptcy filers had medical debts. She didn’t demonstrate the medical debts were the cause of the bankruptcy. (IIRC, the mean value of the medical debt in the principal study she consulted was around $18,000)
We’re constantly reminded that diversity is the backbone of the NHS. I gave a friend a lift to a local private hospital for a minor operation not long ago and for some mysterious reason there didn’t seem to be a lot of diversity around. There was some Asian guy hanging about who was a member of staff – he could have been a Doc or an accountant, no idea. Everyone else though, patients and staff were white. Diversity seemed to be limited to sexy Polish nurses.
Presumably the NHS has somehow monopolised all the vibrancy for itself.
Which, I'm led to believe, is a common occurrence in the States.Replies: @R.G. Camara, @Desiderius, @Redneck farmer, @Bardon Kaldian, @Barnard, @Currahee, @The Alarmist, @Colin Wright, @Harry Baldwin, @Michelle, @sb
The Brits are always going on about their marvellous NHS – I recall there was even a homage to it at the London Olympics
All I know is that I’ve never heard of anyone from another country with a universal public health system who shares this view
It’s just a fact of life that for whatever reason UK health staff leave the country in droves . The UK exports large numbers of medical staff and in turn imports large numbers from the non rich world .
Australian doctors I know say that UK hospitals are a great place to get very wide experience which isn’t quite the same thing as saying it’s a great system for patients . I understand military doctors say something along similar lines
Mind you no sensible person will speak well of the US system
Some. Look at the chart at the bottom of this page…
https://eh.net/encyclopedia/hours-of-work-in-u-s-history/
I see the biggest drop occurring after, though it’s hard to disentangle the effect of the Great Depression.
In any event, the landmark federal law that mandated an 8-hour day came in 1937.
“and that the Afghanis had put a bounty on his head”
They’d have put a bounty on his head anyway, because as a totem of the British tribe, knocking him off would have been a big propaganda victory.
“admitted in a interview with The Guardian that he had killed Afghanis during his course of duty”
How much did his training and a helicopter gunship cost?
http://www.kiplingsociety.co.uk/poems_arith.htm
Save the melodrama. Farm animals get tetracycline, not miracle drugs.
No, she made reference to studies which showed that x% of bankruptcy filers had medical debts. She didn't demonstrate the medical debts were the cause of the bankruptcy. (IIRC, the mean value of the medical debt in the principal study she consulted was around $18,000)Replies: @guest007
But she also made reference to illness causing a family member to drop out of the work force and that one income was not enough to cover all of the fixed expenses such as insurance, taxes, mortgage, etc. The same for divorce and substance abuse.
The NHS is a religion in Britain. The population has been terrorized by horror stories from America. I do not know if all these stories are true, but the father of an American friend of mine fell ill with cancer and was faced with a huge battle with his insurance company to get funding. That is the last thing you need when you are sick.
There is also what you may call “a created folk memory” of a time when operations were carried out on the kitchen table. According to my grandmother, who was born in 1899, these were untrue. Some kind of medical treatment was available even to the poorest between the wars and people were not left to die of appendicitis.
My mother born in 1929 also had vivid memories of the fever wagon. It was horse-drawn and had windows that you could see out of but which you go could not see in through. Children who fell ill with now curable diseases were sent to the isolation hospital and often never came back.
We no longer have fever wagons because of improvements in medical technology.
My experience with the NHS was mixed. My mother died of mesothelioma. Nothing could have saved her, but the NHS eased her passing. Hospice care is very good.
My father died of Lewy Body’s dementia. While in the care of the NHS, he contracted clostridium difficile, because the hospital was filthy.
The worst thing about the NHS is the huge number of bullying hangers on that it employs. They are usually women with a great deal of power and no medical training. Many of the doctors are foreigners and no one is allowed to check up on their qualifications too closely.
One of the comforts of living in NZ is that so many of the doctors are POMS. My lawyer’s son has been so sick in London that a part of his bowel has had to be removed. He returned to NZ to be cared for by his family, but the POM doctors also said he would do better to go back to London as the NHS funds a greater variety of drugs.
The quality of the NHS also depends a lot on where you live. Some regions have quite good hospitals, in others they are shameful. It is called the postcode lottery.
Dose of You · Nick Lowe
https://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/nicklowe/doseofyou.html
Here’s a New Briton, Arwa Mahdawi (“half-Palestinian and half-English”), bemoaning the US health service.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/jul/17/baby-got-bills-week-in-patriarchy-arwa-mahdawi
LOL
The symptoms go away but they can come back at any time.
Name the common denominator.
Hint: it's the sex of the overwhelming majority of clientele.
You can add in 'superfoods', the Royals, heterosexuals who support the more bizarre LGBTetc stuff, and finger-wagging face-nappy-and-'vaccine' scolds during COVID.
They're very different from us, and as a mass they're observably stupider and far more easily-led.
Some of them are very nice to look at, but frankly that doesn't offset the society-wide damage that is generated when the right to vote meets inherent female gullibility.Replies: @J.Ross
(I want to agree but I also don’t want to summon anyone)
Can someone make an argument for what "they" achieve with all the lockdowns? Don't say the goal is "control," that's just a tautology. It would make sense, for instance, if they shut down private schools but kept public schools open. But in reality, they're doing the opposite.Replies: @J.Ross
If you’re serious about this it’s “Operation Lock Down,” it’s at archive dot org. They were already going this way but Brexit and Trump spooked them, so now we get the rushed and clumsy version. Technology has gotten to the point of lending courage to the normal elite Bolshevism that they know everything and are held back merely by the stupid ungrateful masses. End of history, Utopia guaranteed by the same systems that eliminated small business, eating bugs and crawling into pods between 16 hour shifts. The total erasure of class mobility and the American standard of living, Brazil the model.
I was on vacation in London when I started having a dental issue. There was a private dentist a short walk from the hotel, one afternoon I walked in and within an hour or so it was taken care of and I was on my way. It wasn’t cheap – at least as pricey as a cash-only procedure would cost here in the USA, if not more – but the service was high quality and the dentist explained everything every step of the way. She was of South Asian ancestry but spoke perfect English. Anyway in a pinch I very much appreciated that office being there, and it occurring in an English-speaking country.
As a child, I was at times more intimate with some of my plushies than would be respectable to admit. I felt weird and guilty about it, though, as my affection toward such objects had always been much more that like the (normal) affection felt toward a pet, or a form of familial love, as opposed to anything erotic.
What, pray tell, is on each base? And what do you get if you hit a home run?
I'm just reading A.J. Cronin's (creator of Dr Finlay if you're a Brit) autobiographical "Adventures In Two Worlds". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A._J._Cronin Not quite true. A lot of things which could be cured by antibiotics post-45 could still be attacked by surgery.His first call out in the 20s as a general practitioner was to a boy dying of diptheria, he had to perform a tracheotomy by candlelight on a kitchen table. On another occasion he operated in similar conditions on a girl with acute suppurative mastoiditis, worrying about cutting too deep and killing her, uncomfortably aware of her father, demented with worry and with a reputation for mania, watching him closely.On the other hand he had to watch people fading away with TB.Replies: @MEH 0910
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1979/01/25/death-of-tb/