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Comment by whywhywhywhy | Hacker News Reader

It's because the experience you get is completely random and heavily weighted towards the fatal. If you show up with something life threatening they're actually pretty good.

But your experience of non-life threatening can be anything from good, to indifference/boredom to aggressive dismissal. This also applies to things that could be markers of something fatal, analogy would be they do little when smoke is coming out from under the door but do jump into action when the flames are coming out from under the door. Most of the interactions start on off the foot that you're assumed to be a timewaster too.

Keep begging my parents to just go private because I don't like trusting their lives to the random chance they have a good doctor when I can instead have one incentivized by their continued existence.

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The issue is that underfunding the NHS has become so bad that even very serious cases can't be handled appropriately. I know it's an anecdote, but I've had a fairly bad experience recently after a serious bike incident in the middle of a workday, and they took over an hour to send an ambulance, about an hour to be checked, and over 7 hours in the Royal Hospital waiting for treatment.

Legitimately was a worse and slower service than I would have had at my grandparents' place in Eastern Europe, it's a disgrace. It still makes me angry that it's the experience I get after paying 1000s of £ in NHS contributions.

Your description of the NHS sounds exactly like the Canadian healthcare system.

>>Keep begging my parents to just go private [...]

Except for this difference as we don't have the option to choose private care except for a out-patient services (e.g. physical therapy) and certain drugs & therapies. I'm speaking primarily about Ontario and British Columbia, but I think the other provinces and territories are similar.

Hospitals, diagnostic services and physicians are all funded by public taxpayer dollars at both the provincial and federal level, but it is indeed a single healthcare system.

It's the case nationwide in Canada due to rules in the Canada Health Act: if a service is provided by provincial governments (so MSP in BC or OHIP in ON) then it cannot be offered privately.

There have been some workaround attempts in BC (such as the Cambie Surgery Centre, which lost a court case recently-ish) and AB's recent move to give contracts to Catholic health care providers, but the only true "private" option in Canada is the airport.

I could go on about this at length and how it makes me a pariah amongst a flood of anti-American conspiracy theories, but this is a thread about the UK (of which I'm also a citizen) so I'll resist.

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