This didn’t make sense to my American brain until I realized it was Boris Johnson, so this is a joke for people in advanced nations where medicine is a basic service.
For those confused, it’s a British politician, not American. The tories spent far too long in power trying to cripple the NHS, without being too blatant about it. They wanted to introduce a more American style system. Unfortunately for them, a lot of the NHS staff wouldn’t play ball. It’s been hell on the actual staff, but the NHS refused to break.
“From each according to his ability, to each according to his need”
Fwiw, Americans hate the “American style health care” with a smoldering, intense passion. We are ruled by ignorant clowns and rich bullies.
If only we could get to an NHS style healthcare.
It’s well worth fighting for. We pay less than half what Americans pay for better service.
My daughter was born in an nhs hospital, and had complications, they were in for over a week. The biggest expense was snacks (I might have been a bit stressed and feeling helpless). Even parking was cheap.
That’s something they’ll be able to tell their children and grandchildren with pride.
I think it’s awesome somebody said no. I’m buried to my neck in medical debt and will probably never own a house because of it. Shit I’ll probably never get out of low-income housing. Oh well, that’s the price I pay for freedom and democracy I guess. /s
American healthcare is so expensive for those with no or minimal insurance, postpone using hospitals and doctors until a last resort. The predictable result is that when patients finally have to use those services, their problem is often advanced, harder to heal and much more expensive. Our health outcomes are at the bottom of the industrial nations.
To be fair it’s an easy mistake to make, our (American) for-profit healthcare industrial complex is a nightmare. One that certain politicians in the UK, Canada, and I’m sure plenty of others would love to emulate so they can get richer - because barely disguised greed knows not race, religion, creed, border, or time.
It’s been hell on the actual staff, but the NHS refused to break.
The NHS has been broken for some time thanks to repeated budget cuts and privatization of core functions.
The tories are the conservative party. They are our right-wing, mainstream party. Politically, they are closer to the Democrats than republicans, but that’s mostly because America is so extreme right wing compared to most of Europe.
A few years ago, they took a lurch to the right, as well as purging a lot of the less extreme and/or intelligent members. Thankfully, they got throughly bitchslaped out of power recently. We are now into the cleanup phase of their damage (including brexit).
Of course the tories want an American style health care system. We’re all fucking sick and disabled, our dental health is worse than yours was before universal care, none of us can afford to get anything taken care of and a small group of wealthy individuals take in millions. It’s got tory/republican deep in it’s veins.
This is just a shitter version of the joke featuring George Osborne.
It is also essentially a variation of Monty python’s merchant banker skit. Nothing new under the sun.
One could conceivably argue that a healthy and resilient workforce can engage in profitable labor, while a sick and fragile workforce gets trapped in cycles of disability and poverty.
Oh sir! Allow me to clear this up for you. These peons, these random floor workers don’t understand things like money my good sir.
Why it’s the Hospital Admininstrators and Insurance companies that get all the money, not the sick people of course! This allows us to inflate the cost of our goods and services on paper, which in turn we can use to lower our taxable corporate income. And don’t worry - the insurance team makes certain our customers continue to pay while they are outside of and not using the business operations!
Now we of course don’t charge them the “paper prices” because they too need to turn a profit - and no one can actually afford a $10,000 ambulance ride so we can just pretend to argue back and forth while we both write those all off. A delightfully devious scheme I might add my good sir yes yes!
Look. just tell them I get the money. I’ll take a small processing fee of like two bucks to buy myself some coffee and send the rest back to the hospital so you can get back to the business of helping people.
if you’re wondering what I get out of it… well, besides the coffee… i get to say I’m some chief-something-or-another-officer of a hospital on my resume, yes? I’m sure that’ll be good for a job where I make more in a week or two than I do now in a year. We all win.
