Another (personal) reason we desperately need MORE health care reform

[orthodoc]

Originally Posted by Happy Monkey

It's news when NHS does it.

Its SOP when private insurance does it.

Right. When my step-mother was diagnosed with lung cancer, she wasn't given access to the Ontario health system for workup and cancer treatment for over two months. Did the delay make a difference to her outcome? Impossible to say.

On the other hand, my insurance company has refused to pay for chemotherapy for patients who have what is in their estimation a low enough recurrence score not to warrant it. Information is still coming in on these scores and the start of the high-risk category is continually being revised downward; I could have been refused now for a score considered high-risk next year. So I refused to have the test that provides the score, even though it would have provided important information. I just don't have an extra few hundred grand sitting around to pay for chemo (and all complications, current and future) out of pocket. Imagine that.

Both systems restrict access so far as they can, and in both cases it's over money. The difference is, the socialized system is trying to save money, to spread a global budget more thinly across needs, while the private system is trying to maximize profit.