What I learned from my wife's
month in the British medical system.
BY DAVID ASMAN
Wednesday, June 8, 2005 12:00 a.m. EDT
"Mr. Asman, could you come down to the gym? Your wife appears to be having a small problem." In typical British understatement, this was the first word I received of my wife's stroke.
We had arrived in London the night before for a two-week vacation. We spent the day sightseeing and were planning to go to the theater. I decided to take a nap, but my wife wanted to get in a workout in the hotel's gym before theater. Little did either of us know that a tiny blood clot had developed in her leg on the flight to London and was quietly working its way up to her heart. Her workout on the Stairmaster pumped the clot right through a too-porous wall in the heart on a direct path to the right side of her brain.
Hurrying down to the gym, I suspected that whatever the "small" problem was, we might still have time to make the play. Instead, our lives were about to change fundamentally, and we were both about to experience firsthand the inner workings of British health care.
We spent almost a full month in a British public hospital. We also arranged for a complex medical procedure to be done in one of the few remaining private hospitals in Britain. My wife then spent about three weeks recuperating in a New York City hospital as an inpatient and has since used another city hospital for physical therapy as an outpatient. We thus have had a chance to sample the health diet available under two very different systems of health care. Neither system is without its faults and advantages. To paraphrase Thomas Sowell, there are no solutions to modern health care problems, only trade-offs. What follows is a sampling of those tradeoffs as we viewed them firsthand...
This is a very interesting article. It's a very honest comparison of America's and England's health care systems, acknowledging the strengths and weaknesses of both.
You can read the whole thing HERE.
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