As an American I’m curious what it’s like if you need to go to the doctor and how much you pay from say a broken arm to general checkup. Also list what country please
As an American I’m curious what it’s like if you need to go to the doctor and how much you pay from say a broken arm to general checkup. Also list what country please
UK.
Visit to doctor: free
Ambulance trip to hospital: free
Broken arm: free
Pregnancy care, maternity, birth, etc: free
Cancer treatment, including multiple rounds of Chemotherapy, surgery, post-op care, etc etc: free
Prescription: about £10, but I get an annual fixed price unlimited pass which pays for itself in a month or three all the stuff I’m on.
Parking at the hospital: not free.
Dentist: not free.
The dentist is still heavily discounted though
Very much so, yes.
And, how long is the wait for any of the free services for a typical UK resident?
If you’re going where I think you’re going with this I’d like to point out that wait times in the US aren’t exactly zero.
Depends. My annual checkup needed to be booked weeks in advance, whereas when I rang them about a mole that started bleeding, they wanted a picture and when they saw it, they referred me urgently to the dermatology department. I had an appointment that Saturday and they froze it off, but the dermatologist didn’t think it was skin cancer. Since I was there anyway and it was annoying, it was bye bye mole. The NHS can move fast when it needs to. My aunt waited quite a while for her hip replacement but when my other uncle fell and broke his they did it straight away.
If you turn up at A&E (emergency room) at the weekend after pub closing time you’ll be waiting hours and hours, but they deal with the most urgent stuff first.
It used to be better before the conservatives underfunded it for a decade and a half, and having an anti-immigrant policy and restricting placed on UK training hasn’t helped the recruitment crisis any, but it’s still good and I didn’t have to mortgage my house to pay for my relative’s cancer treatment.
Privatisation ruins everything for everyone except the CEOs and shareholders.
Better to have a wait then to not go at all because you can’t afford it.
I used to live there and the NHS wait times were lower than any I had in the U.S. with insurance. Probably depends on the area, and I’ve heard it’s worse than it used to be because the conservatives keep expecting them to do more with less.
There’s also no wasted time. If your appointment was at 9:30, you’d be called in almost right at 9:30. If you’re called into a room, you’re not going to sit there waiting for a nurse to come take your blood pressure and ask what’s happening so they can relay it to the doctor. When you’re done with the doctor, you leave. You don’t have to go pay or wait for someone to check your finances or any of that.
And their health insurance is better because it has to at least offer something the NHS doesn’t.
They broke your arm for free. Next time it’ll be a leg. /s