BBC One tonight: Poor America

suburbanwifey

Well, I was told that they thought we all had 'meth mouth' and all had bad teeth too from an American I spoke to online, so this view of us is common I think .... (I don't have meth mouth, do you ???) LOL (I had to look up what it meant when he said it hehe)

suburbanwifey

wellused wrote: »

In my experience Americans have a very strange view of the outside world I have even heard the opinion expressed that all British people have "bad teeth", the only explanation I can give for that is because the British people they see on tv don't have brilliant white teeth.

Dentistry is so expensive in this country, I guess a lot cannot afford it and if you are lucky enough to have a NHS dentist, most of the time they choose to 'take it out' rather than fix and crown etc ... whatever is cheapest! NHS dentistry is crap.

wellused

My wife and I have just changed our NHS dentist to one nearer home who were taking on patients they had several dentists with NHS places to choose from so whether there is a shortage of NHS dentists in other areas I don't know.

Out,_Vile_Jelly

I had a great time the summer I worked in the US as a student, in Colorado. A local colleague once asked in genuine curiosity why I was converting a price in a shop from dollars to pounds; "you don't use dollars in England?" I also met a guy at a Greyhound stop who insisted I must know Mick Jagger "as Britain is a small country and everyone knows each other."

The US we see in films and high production TV series is mostly the big, cosmopolitan cities like NYC, Chicago and LA where protagonists are urbane, educated, well dressed, witty and have great hair and teeth. There are vast swathes of the country where people don't own a passport, only ever shop at Walmart, have never been on public transport and live from paycheque (check) to paycheque. You can't really generalise about America at all, it has so many different facets.

I Know he's become quite annoying over the years, but Michael Moore's first film Roger and Me about the slow death of his hometown Flint is genuinely shocking and a proper piece of film making. Winter's Bone was also good recently at showing a different sort of American society.

Butterfly_Brain

Generali wrote: »

Do you know of a country with this sort of system? I can think of a couple but it ain't the NHS.

No 'free' system of healthcare can deliver care efficiently as if everything is priced at zero there is no difference between spending hundreds of thousands on a treatment and spending tens of pounds on a different treatment, perhaps on a different patient.

A system that imposes some costs on patients will always be more efficient. The Aussie system is a particularly fine example although there are others I believe. The NHS is expensive and inefficient and can never be anything else.

Australians and British spend broadly the same amount overall on heath care, whether provided by the state, privately or via a charity (8.5% of GDP vs 8.4% of GDP - link) despite Australia facing great difficulties providing health cover to a part of her population because of their geographical spread.

The life expectancy at birth for an Aussie is 16 months higher than for a Briton; infant mortality rates are 16% higher in the UK than Aus; mortality 'amenable to health care' (that is deaths that could have been prevented by better treatment) are 47% higher in the UK than in Aus.

Rather than compare the UK's system to another failing one, it would be better to compare it to one that is succeeding!

Are you an Aussie by any chance Generali ?

Butterfly_Brain

Welcome to the Con-Dem dream :eek::eek::eek:.

Generali

Butterfly_Brain wrote: »

Are you an Aussie by any chance Generali ?

Nope. I'm British.

Any system that involves co-funding is likely to be better than the NHS. The Japanese system (where you pay a flat proportion of costs with a local Government insurance system for the poor) is apparently excellent too.

If the NHS is so great and The Envy of The World, why has pretty much nobody used it as a model for their healthcare system?

A._Badger

Daring to voice criticism of the NHS has somehow acquired the status of taking the name of God in vain in the 12th century.

Why people feel so pathetically grateful for an often inefficient, frequently inadequate, eye-wateringly expensive system, delivered in a true top-down manner is a great puzzle.

And as for the posters making sweeping generalisations about Americans' sweeping generalisations...

mumps

A._Badger wrote: »

Daring to voice criticism of the NHS has somehow acquired the status of taking the name of God in vain in the 12th century.

Why people feel so pathetically grateful for an often inefficient, frequently inadequate, eye-wateringly expensive system, delivered in a true top-down manner is a great puzzle.

And as for the posters making sweeping generalisations about Americans' sweeping generalisations...

I don't think people should be pathetically grateful, and I have made complaints about medical care of a loved one that I thought was disgraceful but if you have an emergency then the trip to hospital in an ambulance with blue flashing lights, doctors and nurses waiting for you at the door and the sudden grabbing of you as they move you to a bed and perhaps, as in my case, the anaesthetist reassures you as he quietly goes about his business is amazing, reassuring and very, very impressive. They don't always get it right but alot of people are grateful, hopefully not pathetically.

A._Badger

mumps wrote: »

I don't think people should be pathetically grateful, and I have made complaints about medical care of a loved one that I thought was disgraceful but if you have an emergency then the trip to hospital in an ambulance with blue flashing lights, doctors and nurses waiting for you at the door and the sudden grabbing of you as they move you to a bed and perhaps, as in my case, the anaesthetist reassures you as he quietly goes about his business is amazing, reassuring and very, very impressive. They don't always get it right but alot of people are grateful, hopefully not pathetically.

Funnily enough, I have had personal experience of that within the past month, so please don't go all emotive on me.

In my case, the flashing blue lights and so on appeared on the scene an hour and a half after having tried to get some help from the pathetically inadequate out of hours NHS GP service - in my case staffed by an arrogant, supremely unhelpful, German alleged doctor who was - according to the paramedic who did attend - paid many hundreds of pounds to sit in a call centre and say 'call an ambulance'.

The system is broken and needs fixing but there are too many vested interests, and too many suffering from Stockholm syndrome, to allow that to happen.