Hacker News Reader

Comment by emayljames | Hacker News Reader

National Health Service. Free at the point of use. No insurance. No "co-pays". No ultimate death panel of them all: provision based on financial or social status. A basic human need provided to all.

View on HN

"Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

The value of a submission like this is the specific new phenomenon it's about. Generic discussion, especially generic ideological discussion, is always the same and therefore off topic on HN. The NHS in general, or healthcare systems in general, are as generic a topic as it gets.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

I'm sure you had no intention of starting a flamewar, yet you can see the incipient flamewar already in the few replies this comment received.

* Needs volunteers to function

Not to function - but it certainly helps at the moment when the majority of the world is in crisis mode.

The UK health service is one of the few things I’m actually still proud of about the UK.

During my brief visit to the Midlands many years ago, the U.K. seems to have a community cohesion that we don’t have much in the US (many rescue services are non profit and operate exclusively with volunteers for example). They will benefit from it through efforts such as this.

A lot of small towns in the US have all or largely-volunteer fire departments. Search-and-rescue teams too.

I mean, the midlands are more pastoral than places like London. You will find the same community cohesion, including volunteer fire departments and (often church-based) benevolent associations, in most rural parts of America.

American cities on the other hand, like most cities, do often lack community cohesion.

> the U.K. seems to have a community cohesion that we don’t have much in the US (many rescue services are non profit and operate exclusively with volunteers for example)

Counter-example: I thought the majority of fire and rescue people in the US were volunteers?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volunteer_fire_department#Unit...

It’s a good point, but quite a bit of the US population lives in urban areas, no? Which is going to overlap with where quite a bit of healthcare system strain might occur, making volunteers necessary.

Will citizens heed the call? To be determined.

In order to support above-and-beyond needs ushered in by a worldwide pandemic:

– delivering medicines from pharmacies;

– driving patients to appointments;

– bringing them home from hospital;

– or making regular phone calls to check on people isolating at home.

They don't need volunteers to merely function, but then we both know there was no honest intent behind your comment in the first place.

"The American Hospital Association, American Medical Association and American Nurses Association asked Congress on Thursday to allocate $100 billion to help health-care personnel and providers, including physicians, nurses and hospitals, respond to the new coronavirus, according to a letter on the hospital association’s website."

(https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-usa-ba...)

To be fair, all health systems seem to currently be relying on charity to deal with this crises.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com