Doctors Reid and Pelosi have great bedside manners – or so I’m told. They’re putting a plan together to take over our medical care and they’re determined to ram it through by October. This is an outright takeover of 17% of our total economy.
There are two things wrong with the Democrats’ plans for you and me. First, we can’t possibly afford it (not that it matters). Second, it means that the quality of care that we’re used to will go down – just like in every other nationalized scheme.
I lived under Britain’s National Health Service in the late 1970s – even then, getting any kind of procedure done took six months unless you were on death’s doorstep. It’s only gotten worse. Any routine search of British papers – broadsheet or tabloid – dredges up one horror story after another.
For all you fools who actually think that ObamaCare is going to be an improvement, I leave you with this montage of stories about DIY dentistry in the UK. Even in my day, the standard of British dental care was pretty atrocious compared to the US. It was always disappointing to meet an otherwise attractive woman, only to recoil at her smile. That one discolored tooth in front usually did it. But under the benevolent oversight of the all-seeing state, you see, dentistry is at a premium. So enjoy the montage as you think about your own teeth.
From the New York Times (2006):
“I snapped it out myself,” said William Kelly, 43, describing his most recent dental procedure, the autoextraction of one of his upper teeth.
William Kelly, 43, extracted part of his own tooth, leaving a black stump. He plans to pull one more.
Now it is a jagged black stump, and the pain gnawing at Mr. Kelly’s mouth has transferred itself to a different tooth, mottled and rickety, on the other side of his mouth. “I’m in the middle of pulling that one out, too,” he said. . . .
But the problem is serious. Mr. Kelly’s predicament is not just a result of cigarettes and possibly indifferent oral hygiene; he is careful to brush once a day, he said. Instead, it is due in large part to the deficiencies in Britain’s state-financed dental service, which, stretched beyond its limit, no longer serves everyone and no longer even pretends to try.
Mr. Kelly, interviewed in a health clinic here as he waited for his son to see a doctor, last visited a dentist six years ago, in Sussex.Since moving to Rochdale, a working-class suburb of Manchester, he has been unable to find a National Health Service dentist willing to take him on.
Every time he has tried to sign up, lining up with hundreds of others from the ranks of the desperate and the hurting — “I’ve seen people with bleeding gums where they’ve ripped their teeth out,” he said grimly — he has arrived too late and missed the cutoff.
From the UK Daily Mail:
A man fixed his front tooth with superglue after failing to find an NHS dentist.
Gordon Cook, 55, has used the bizarre “DIY dentistry” technique on a loose crown for the last three years – with each fresh application of glue lasting around two months.
The father of seven, who was erased from his original dentist’s register after moving to a new home in Tranmere, Merseyside, said he turned to glue after losing hope of finding a dentist. He said: “I tried to find a new dentist but they had all gone private.
“A lot of them said they would take me on as an NHS patient, but only if I agreed to have the loose crown fixed as a private patient, which would cost around £100.
“In the end, I just decided to take matters into my own hands. I had read somewhere that super glue was invented for medical use, to bond skin, so I gave it a go.
“I tried a few different brands but the one I use now, which is just called Industrial Super Glue, is the best.
And from the UK Telegraph, which describes the government’s imposition of a new contract on the country’s dentists in 2008. The result? Fewer people getting care because the contract further erodes the economic incentives to practice dentistry at all.
The shake-up of NHS dentistry has been a disaster with standards of care dropping and almost one million fewer people being treated on the health service under the new system, a damning report by MPs has found.
Instead of improving access to NHS dentistry the reforms have made it worse, the report by the House of Commons Health Select Committee found.
The number of dentists working in the health service has fallen, the number of NHS treatments carried out has dropped and in many areas patients are still experiencing severe difficulties in finding a dentist to treat them.
Worryingly, complex treatments carried out on the NHS have dropped by half while both referrals to hospital and tooth extractions have increased.
This suggests dentists are simply removing teeth rather than taking on complicated treatments because they have become uneconomical to provide.
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