Probably not very likely. If your emergency is urgent but not actually life threatening, then you might. You might - might - think of it if you have gall bladder or appendix types of pain, if you aren't in too much pain to think about it.
And how, exactly, would this go into place? Would you call the emergency line, who proceeds to upsell you on a premium emergency room that will see you right now if only you pay money upfront? Does this also mean that poor people's lives are worth less since they cannot pay up? How about teenagers, who might be calling the emergency line yet don't actually have money to pay?
Also your tone isn't conducive to a constructive discussion and is not appropriate when responding to someone who is suggesting ways to make the world a better place. Just because you can't imagine someone's idea working doesn't mean it's a bad one.
I don't care if you find my tone constructive, by the way. The issues I've raise are real issues, and if you can't explain how you'd get around these and still be sure to have the same quality of care for the poorest of people, it isn't a good plan. Unless, you know, the "separate but equal" (Which rarely works) is your goal.
I'm not sure why you are so belligerent, without engagement in each others arguments this is pointless so I'll stop here.
"Hey y'all, anyone know a good place for heart stuff? My husband can't feel his left arm and keeps passing out! Preferably cheap!"
<Your neighbour Tom is typing...>
For someone that is used to social/universal healthcare (like UK, Norway, France, Germany) the prospect of having to deal with stupid for-profit situations during an emergency are laughable. But for someone living in that hell, it is something normal. Not for anything you read countless of anecdotes of people deciding to stay at home and use some superglue or rolled towels when they have an accident and bleed.
I've had the opportunity of experience the two systems (UK' NHS, Germany´s Gesetzliche Krankenversicherung, Mexico's IMSS for public, and Mexico's private system) and really makes me angry that society is moving toward for-profit privatized systems instead of looking to fix the issues in universal/public systems. (It's like if when we saw that the police or the firefighters were not working, we decided to make law enforcement private... throwing the baby out with the bathwater)
Anyway, the NHS has also paid private clinics already because their own facilities are at capacity.
Let’s not overlook the aging population in the UK please. There are many more factors than simply “the Tories are to blame”
I'm also skeptical the IFS have managed to accurately estimate the required increase in funding. They don't go into their workings from what I can see, but I doubt they've accurately included the effect of the lifetime allowance on pensions causing doctors to avoid overtime or the £100k tax bracket where you lose your personal allowance not moving since 2009 which more and more doctors will fall into. I'd imagine they've underestimated it, but would be happy to hear evidence to the contrary.
That's not to say that I think any other party has a solution or is properly holding the Tories to account on this.
I'll admit I haven't thought too hard about the problem, but I think the fairest solution would be to make pensioners pay national insurance on their income. It wouldn't affect the poorest pensioners and since national insurance is no longer ring fenced for pensions/healthcare I'm not sure what the justification for a tax break based on age even is anymore.
As someone who intends to subsist on more in retirement that change would negatively affect me, but I still think it's fair. I know that this would be deeply unpopular though, so I don't hold out much hope of it happening anytime soon.
Maybe that isn't the best solution, but I really wish we'd start to have real discourse on how we need to restructure our society as the demographic of the country continues to skew older.
[0] https://ifs.org.uk/publications/9186 (figure 5)
Young people should not be subsidising old people who no longer work - especially those same young people who don't own house or have savings or a pension.
A hospital having a 20% bigger budget for their janitorial staff isn't in a better position if it's also been required to move from hiring full time cleaners in-house to contracting an approved cleaning company that has 30% profit margin baked in. An NHS patient isn't helped knowing that 50% more funding goes into paying consultants for the problem they have, if gradually more and more of those consultants are moving to private health companies and having to be rented back to the NHS at a markup that pays both the doctor and the company's shareholders. Etc etc.
Sure, the population demographics are related, but even if we had the exact same population as 20 years ago we'd be in a much worse situation; plus it's the government's job to pay attention to things like demo changes in their population, and to listen to the warnings that have been coming from the medical community for many years, and should have been proactively funding better social care (instead of completely abandoning it to local councils while also lowering their funding) AND making the NHS even better (rather than gradually turning it into an umbrella for private companies who eat up any budget increases).
Using what for doctors?
The problem is a supply side shortage of medical staff. Praying to the god of the private sector won't magically cause doctors to appear.
I'll remind everybody again. Primary care in the UK has been in private hands since 1948. It's the lack of capacity in the private part of the NHS that is driving people towards A&E for basic stuff.
If you have a genuine emergency, you'll be seen immediately virtually anywhere in the US.