Single Payer Health Care

For John, BLUF:  While single payer health care may sound good, an examination under the hood may reveal problems.  Nothing to see here; just move along.

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"It crept up so slowly that I didn't know anything was wrong - I just thought I was putting on timber."

Here is the sub-headline:

"I've been with my partner Jamie Gibbins for 10 years and we did wonder a few times if I was pregnant - but we did home tests and they always ruled it out....  Looking at me, anyone would have thought I was nine months gone."

Said [the woman], quoted in "Woman's ovarian cyst 'weight of seven newborn babies'" (BBC).

From the Althouse blog.

Here is the lede plus one:

"I was lying there with Jamie beside me as the radiologist moved the [sonogram] probe over my tummy.  I saw her eyes widen in horror, but the screen was just blank. The look on her face said it all - something was wrong, and when she said she had to get a consultant I started to panic.  Jamie did his best to reassure me but I felt paralysed with fear...  [The consultant] told me I wasn't fat all - I was actually quite thin."...

The cyst was finally removed in March last year, and was revealed to be 26kg the weight of a seven or eight-year-old child - or seven average-sized newborn babies.

And this is how Professor Althouse wraps it up:

This happened not in what we traditionally call the "third world," but in Swansea, Wales.  The BBC, which I've tended to think of as a high-quality news operation, presents this — with photographs — as just a weird human interest story.  There isn't a word about how access to health care in the UK can be this bad.

This is a buyer beware warning.  While the National Health Service (NHS) is the publicly funded national healthcare system for England, it is pretty much the same across the UK.  It is the largest single-payer healthcare system in the world.  "In the world," and it doesn't seem to work all that well.

Here is additional discussion of cost and quality of the English NHS.

Hat tip to Ann Althouse.

Regards  —  Cliff