Do this or I will come around and bop you on the nose no.3

[fpb]

The only good thing to come out of the MsScribe revelations affair has been that I have caught up with the details of the CharityWank affair, and specifically the health issues about a lady called Christina. The rest of it does not matter, but here is one person who, thanks to the wonders of private American medicine and insurance, is left in serious and life-threatening pain every stage of whose care sucks money from her family like Dracula. I am sympathetic to conservatives on a lot of things, but any conservative who wants to defend private medicine in the face of events like this is in my view a heartless so-and-so. However, never mind that. This lady needs help and needs help now. This is the address of her website: http://www.4christina.org/. I ASK EVERY PERSON WHO READS THIS TO VISIT IT AND DO WHAT YOU CAN. If you cannot give money, you can offer stuff to be sold on e-bay to raise funds, or even purchase items from Amazon through her rather than through any other source. Anything can help. But please, everyone who reads this, do something. And paste the address and story on your own LJs and websites. Spread the word. Get busy, dammit!

Comments

Re: Not you, too.

[chthonya]

What does 'good faith' have to do with National Health policy? The policyholder paid the premiums. The insurance company paid the benefits.

My apologies - I read your 'good faith' comment as being 'good faith' to society at large, whereas (if I'm not misinterpreting your reply) you were referring primarily to the company's policyholders? Hence my response, which is probably indicative of the rather different terms in which the debate (as well as that on corporate social responsibility) is conducted in Europe.


Same as National Health would. But why do you think an insurance company would fight forcing people to pay their premiums?

It doesn't quite work that way here - or at least, it isn't thought about the same way. It's not like in Canada (well, BC, which is the only Province of which I have direct experience) where there's a health insurance deduction from the paycheck. We do pay a 'National Insurance' contribution, but it also covers unemployment benefits and the like. The political debate is never framed as 'well, we can spend this many millions more on nurses, but your NI contributions will have to increase' - it's seen as one of the things we pay for via taxation, and health vies for priority with education, defence, crime prevention and all the other things we expect our government to fund on our behalf. So right from the start the philosophy behind health care here is more communal.


Do you get to "opt out" of National Health and pocket the difference?

No, although the Conservative party has occasionally put forward the idea of a 'voucher' scheme which, from my understanding, would amount to that (it's one reason they are widely distrusted to look after the Health Service). There are those, of course, who opt out and don't pocket the difference, because they feel that going private gives them a better service - increasingly this is a company-supplied benefit, but only for very large companies. And the National Health here isn't seen as being as good as provisions in other European countries - but then, those countries pay for it. Part of the cultural problem we have in this country is that we're 'American' enough to want low taxes, but European enough to want good services.