Posted on 07/30/2007 6:49:47 AM PDT by RKV
A woman aged 108 has been told she must wait 18 months before the Health Service will give her the hearing aid she needs.
Former piano teacher Olive Beal, one of the oldest people in Britain, has poor eyesight and uses a wheelchair. The delay could mean she will be unable to communicate and listen to the music she loves. Now her family have said that realistically Mrs Beal is unlikely ever to receive the digital hearing aid that will save her from isolation.
The one-time suffragette is one of hundreds of thousands of older people made to wait up to two years and sometimes more for modern digital hearing aids that make a dramatic difference to their ability to hear and communicate. The case of Mrs Beal comes just a few days after the Mail revealed how another centenarian, Esme Collins, has been threatened with eviction from the nursing home where she has lived for ten years in a dispute between home owners and the local council over her fees.
Mrs Beal, who lives in a care home in Deal in Kent, has used an old-fashioned analogue hearing aid for the last five years. She has now been assessed as needing a more modern digital hearing aid which cuts out background noise and makes it easier to hear conversation or music. These cost around £1,000 on the private market.
But Eastern and Coastal Kent Primary Care Trust have told her family she must wait 18 months before she gets one on the NHS. By then Mrs Beal will be aged 110.
She said yesterday: 'I could be dead by then.' Her youngest son was a World War Two soldier killed in Normandy on the day after the D-Day landings. She was widowed 45 years ago. Donna Tipping of the Royal National Institute for the Deaf said: 'I am afraid this is a common problem.
'In some parts of the country waiting times are more than two years, which is shocking. The new digital hearing aids can really transform people's lives. 'It is an issue of quality of life, with isolation, frustration and withdrawing from society caused by loss of hearing, and it is sad because this is reversible.' A spokesman for Eastern and Coastal Kent Primary Care Trust said: 'We are reducing waiting times.
'The priority is given to patients who do not have an existing hearing aid, but we accept our service needs improving. We apologise to any patient kept waiting for a new or replacement hearing aid.'
(Oh, yeah, /sarc!)
Countries such as the UK and France do spend a smaller fraction of their GDP on healthcare than we in the US do. That said, you get what you pay for...
I thought his Lardship sort of glossed over this part—you know—the waiting in line for weeks or months for care.
LOL! Her Thighness Hillary and His Lardship Mikie! What a pair.
This is one of the basic problems with socialized medicine. I often tell the story of a woman I once worked with — she was a native of the UK and had family still over there. Her father was diagnosed as needing bypass surgery. In the U.S., he would probably have it ASAP. I believe he had to wait a year for it in Britain. And actually, according to my former co-worker, a year’s wait was pretty good. Some have to wait even longer. I remember my co-worker being constantly anxious for her father the whole time he had to wait for the bypass.
It’s just madness to have a system like that. Yet, this is what the socialist democrats want...for us that is. No doubt if and when they need health care, they will move to the head of the line. Or get it at some private institution only the rich can afford.
1000 pounds and her kids, grandkids, great grandkids, great great grandkids, great great great grandkids (are we done?) can’t chip in 2 or three grand. Yes of course they should not have too, but why only show one side of the story. This woman has I am sure used up ALOT of medical funds in her life already. Remember it is all on the tax payers dime.
Not really: it only seems that way if you exclude the cost of taxes used to fund government health benefits, and the resultant loss of investment income and economic activity occasioned by the reduction in personal income due to those taxes.
OK. Socialized medicine kills people and makes them suffer.
But a lot of these suffragettes later went on to push for a Leftist socio-political agenda...like socialized medicine. I hope she isn’t reaping what she sowed.
Can’t a US hearing-aid company give her one for PR’s sake if not for humanity’s sake?
Well, from the viewpoint of the “progressives” in politics, Olive as a ‘duty to die’ anyhow.
This is exactly what the Clintons have in mind for the rest of us.
Care will be rationed, one way or another. Either by price or by government fiat.
The advantage of a system that rations by price is that shortages lead to higher profits, which leads to increased supply which eliminates the shortage. There is no such profit motive in the government fiat model.
People say that the free market model is heartless and cruel. I would say that it is heartless, but is incapable of being cruel because it is undirected. In effect, the free market model is less cruel because it, by and large, provides what people need. The government model, on the other hand, is cruel by design and effect.
Don't get ahead of yourself... We're still fighting over "Right to Die"... "Duty to Die" doesn't come until the next step.
I wouldn’t recommend a US company sending her a new hearing aid. The Uros need to get a belly full of socialized medicine.
Also, rationing keeps prices high, whereas competition drives them down.
Just wait 'til people start buying into the pro-euthanasia "qualilty of life" argument. Old folks like this won't be around to embarass the ruling elite and their precious universal health system.
No, not really. The data is pretty well known.
I was kinda thinking of this...
Thomas Sowell
“The duty to die”
http://www.jewishworldreview.com — OUR betters have been telling us how to live our lives for so long that it is only the next logical step for them to tell us when to die. We have grown so used to meekly accepting their edicts, even on what words we can and cannot use — “swamp” has virtually disappeared from the English language, replaced by “wetlands,” as “bums” has been replaced by “the homeless, “sex” by “gender” — that it seems only fitting that they should now tell us when to die.
The new phrase is “the duty to die.” The anointed have proclaimed this duty, so who are we ordinary people to question it? Former Colorado governor Richard Lamm has said that the elderly should “consider making room in the world for the young by simply doing with less medical care and letting themselves die.” Colorado didn’t seem that desperately over-crowded to me, but Lamm is one of the voices of the anointed, so their arbitrary dogmas become well-known facts by sheer repetition.
In the Hastings Center Report, described as a journal of medical ethics, a medical ethicist says that “health care should be withheld even for those who want to live” if they have already lived beyond the politically correct number of years — which he suggests might be 75. He says that, after such a “full rich life” then “one is duty-bound to die.”
There’s more. Another medical ethicist would consider extending the limit to 80 years but, after that, medical care should be denied to all who have “lived out a natural life span.”
You may wonder who these people are and who gave them the right to play G-d. But the answer is simple. They are legion and it is we who have supinely accepted their pronouncements on so many things for so long that they see no reason to limit how far they can go.
There was a time when Americans told people like this where they could go. But one of the many phrases to fade from our vocabulary is “None of your business!” Today, everything is everybody’s business. The next step is for it to become the government’s business.
This collectivist mentality has led to big noises being made in the media and in academia about whether corporate executives or professional athletes are being paid “too much.” I don’t know how many millions of dollars Derek Jeter gets paid for playing shortstop for the Yankees, but I do know that not one of those millions comes from me. That’s between him and George Steinbrenner. It’s none of my business.
How did we get sucked into collectivizing decisions that were once up to individuals? Purple prose is one factor. One of those who wants to see old-timers removed from the scene declares that the costs of keeping them alive is “a demographic, economic and medical avalanche.” Melodramatic phrase-making has become the royal road to power.
What is far more of a threat than the little dictators who are puffed up with their own importance is the willingness of so many others to surrender their freedom and their money in exchange for phrases like “crisis” and “compassion.” Will America go down in history as the country which defeated collectivism in the 20th century and then became collectivist itself in the 21st century?
Collectivism takes on many guises and seldom uses its own real name. Words like “community” and “social” soothe us into thinking that collectivist decision-making is somehow higher and nobler than individual or “selfish” decision-making. But the cold fact is that communities do not make decisions. Individuals who claim to speak for the community impose their decisions on us all.
Collectivist dictation can occur from the local level to the international level, and the anointed push it at all levels. They want a bigger role for the UN, for the International Court of Justice at the Hague and for the European Union bureaucrats in Brussels. Anything except individual freedom.
You cannot even build or remodel your own home without finding yourself under the thumb of local bureaucrats and tangled in red tape. A couple who are trying to have a home built in coastal California are discovering that it takes far less time to build the house than it does to deal with the arbitrary edicts of local bureaucrats and the reams of local regulations. The husband has taken to singing in the shower: “We shall overcome some day ... “
Maybe they will and maybe they won’t. Maybe we are all destined to give up our freedom to those ruthless enough to take it from us — or glib enough to soothe us into handing it over to them
Amazingly, the Hildabeast's plan was worse than the UK plan. Acording to the article: She [Olive Beal] has now been assessed as needing a more modern digital hearing aid .... These cost around £1,000 on the private market. In Hillary's plan, buying outside of the government plan would have not been legal. At least in the UK you have the option of buying care privately. Hillarycare would have no such safety valve.
Maybe there would be profit in building hospital ships outside the US territorial waters. However, I would expect the government to harrass those ships endlessly if they start embarrassing the socialists in the US.
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