There was a woman with no VHI who sold her belongings to raise the money to go private and she was operated on in a public hospital
Real account
The Cross Border initiative is getting very popular. If you’re waiting for a hip replacement through the HSE, you’re probably looking at losing a half decade of your life in terms of the pain and reduced quality of life you will experience. If you go across the border you will get it all sorted in 6 months. That’s a big difference for anyone, but if you’re in your sixties or seventies it determines how you live out a large portion of your remaining life.
Our consultants have a racket going in the HSE. It’s disgusting.
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You’d be better off cancelling your health insurance and buying some cheap hovel in the North to claim residency up there.
There was something on RTE last night was there? I heard a bit about it on the radio this morning saying consultants now see more private patients than public ones. That’s the consultants we pay, using state facilities we paid for to treat private patients ahead of public ones. What a fucking country.
It is just wrong. It wouldn’t even be that difficult to begin to sort it out, other than the person tasked would need fairly thick skin.
Heard about it but I didn’t see it. I know of a few cases where I thought the consultant was taking the piss, leaving a huge amount of dates empty when there were 3+ year waiting lists. But it turns out it’s standard.
Fucking omnishambles
I heard a 90 year old on Morning Ireland interviewed who had it done. Had to pay up front and then get money back from HSE. Alternative was he would be blind for as he said “whatever time I have left” and he’s a carer for blind wife. Scandalous.
Earlier a consultant who worked in Ireland and now works in Alberta Canada said that the population is about the same but much bigger geographically and they have six main hospitals versus 47 in Ireland. They spend less on healthcare and much better outcomes. Average wait time to get appointment for consultant is 4 weeks and you get seen within 15 minutes of appointment time.
Very hard to fight the medical profession. Beyond the fact that they are typically well off and well connected, they have the legitimacy of their expertise and its hard to counter that. They can always fall back on ‘patient safety’.
Because private healthcare is a disaster. The US is 100 times worse than we are.
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Ya but you tell someone they’ve to drive for two hours to get to the hospital and they’ll have a meltdown and all the TDs will be up in arms
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Fucks sake
If you have private health insurance and get admitted you are entitled to a free bed but the form you sign waived that right and they charge insurance company
Best way I heard it explained was healthcare in Ireland is rationed. Everything else stems from that. The delays and waiting lists are designed to make it hard to access.
It’s a fucked up system altogether. They send you home as fast as they can then bring you back in a few days later for a test or a consultation which would have been free had you been in the hospital , but is now €150 or whatever because your an outpatient.
The cataract thing is a disgrace. It takes about ten minutes to remove a cataract. They should be rolling into surgery on a conveyor belt, being partially or fully blind for a year or whatever because the state is so utterly incompetent is fucking ridiculous.
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One could argue with some of that.
But the main point is correct. It’s not like Ireland skimps on health care in general. It’s just badly served.
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Rather than spending money upfront sorting problems quickly, they drag the shit out of it, spend the same again on temporary solutions, before ultimately spending the money they should have spent first day fixing the problem.
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Absolute nonsense.
Having extensive experience of both, Ireland is essentially third world in terms of health care compared to the US. The HSE is essentially a shit version of the NHS. History teaches us that government run systems (in anything) are the most inefficient with zero accountability and private enterprise does a much better job. The job of the government should be to fund where needed and regulate, not to run.
Canada is actually a good model, but contrary to what people think it’s not a government run system like the UK or Ireland with everyone employed by the government. The government funds hospitals for example, but the hospitals are pretty independent in terms of how they are run. The Canadian system isn’t perfect by any means, which explains why thousands of Canadians travel to the US for treatment where treatment options, wait times and outcomes are better.
The US has plenty of problems, but like all complex problems solutions aren’t easy. A lot of things are done well, Medicare is probably the most comprehensive system for the elderly in the world, you certainly wouldn’t have the problems highlighted above for cataract surgery or any condition for that matter. It comes at a price though, as Medicare, Medicaid and the VA are horrendous in terms of wastage and fraud.
The biggest problem in the US is out of control costs, as instead of regulating the medical industry politicians are bought off by lobbyists for the industry. So much for government serving the people. The second problem is a significant percentage of working young people simply refuse to buy health insurance, but still expect top quality health care and someone else to pay for it should they get sick.