Isn’t that N.I.C.E?
From “Primary Source” commenter “Grumpy Student”:
By the way, anyone who wants to read all about the body set up to ration healthcare in the UK only needs to look up the Wikipedia entry for “NICE”, the National Institute of Clinical Excellence (good name) whose job it is to determine which treatments the NHS will offer based on a cost effectiveness metric. The good thing about this policy (from their point of view) is that patients denied treatment usually die before any court case completes.
It’s important to understand that money the individual has paid in taxes towards healthcare becomes “public money” and therefore they have no right to expect it to be used for their treatment. Therefore the decision becomes “is this treatment in the public interest or could we spend this money doing something else?” not “what are the patient’s needs/is this patient entitled to the treatment?”.
The reason they strike you off if you pay for the treatment yourself is that doing so is seen as using financial wealth to obtain a better standard of care than generally available which is contrary to the philosophy of the NHS (I kid you not).
In the NHS, maintaining socialist dogma is more important than patient care.
Now, go read Neo-neocon’s story of her experience dealing with chronic pain, and what the National Health Service’s National Institute of Clinical Excellence is now, for economic reasons, recommending for people in its system with similar problems.
Then tell me again why nationalized health care is such a rush?