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Comment by iamben | Hacker News Reader

UK: A dentist will see you for an emergency appointment pretty quickly. I can usually get a routine appointment within a few weeks, but if it's a routine check-up I don't mind scheduling it for a few weeks/a month out. If I'm going private I can usually get a routine appointment same week.

For more urgent enquiries with an NHS doctor I can usually get a phonecall next day, and they'll ask me to come in if it's serious. For routine/non-urgent stuff you might wait a week or two.

Obviously this is going to vary depending on where you live, and the NHS is not without it's problems... But it's essentially free and a wonderful thing.

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Aren't NHS medical workers in a constant state of protest over low wages and bad working conditions? I know the doctor/nurse brain drain from Canada and the UK to the US used to be really bad. I haven't seen what the statistics are recently.

[0] https://www.marketplace.org/story/2024/02/19/uk-nhs-doctor-s...

This is largely due to deliberate underfunding by a succession of governments taking ~~bribes~~ lobbying from private healthcare firms.

https://privatisation.everydoctor.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/...

It's complicated. They are underpaid relative to inflation, but there's also a massive queue of graduates who want to replace them. If the govt aquiesces to their demands then they may need to do the same for other unions.

Finding an NHS dentist is nearly impossible in most of the UK, though.

In the UK, most people simply get Bupa dental insurance. A basic plan costs like 25 pounds per month. Affordable I'd say. Many people spend more than that on beer and public transport.

I know that does not help someone who has become homeless or lost their job and cannot afford the 25 pounds a month (300 pounds a year). That is why I say it is important for people who are employed to get a Bupa insurance plan. Most people do that anyway. This reduces the burden on the NHS Dental and help provide free dental treatment for people who genuinely need it.

For non-dental medical issues, I think the NHS is pretty good. When I lived in UK, I always got same-day appointments for routine check-ups and same-week appointments for more complex investigations.

Whilst I understand that reasoning, I disagree with it. Private insurance should not be necessary to begin with, and if it must exist for whatever rational reason, the insurance should be public as well. Anything that has to do with healthcare (not talking about optional cosmetic surgery, of course) should be handled by / via public healthcare services.

Furthermore, I would say that it's wrong to look at the situation in terms of "reducing the burden on the NHS Dental", since that is literally what's there for. If people don't opt for cosmetic surgery, then it's a healthcare issue and we created this institution/branch for this very purpose. Otherwise we can easily end up speaking in terms of how much of a burden being alive is, and how eating (regular) food and drinking water are poor economic decisions, a topsy-turvy way of looking at the very reason to have an 'economy'.

"In the UK, most people simply get Bupa dental insurance."

Respectfully that is completely wrong, do you even live here? Nobody wants to pay for private healthcare here (takeup is ~10%) and people don't care about teeth as much as they probably should.

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