Posted on 01/14/2014 4:12:40 AM PST by Cincinatus' Wife
As we hoisted champagne flutes in the first seconds of 2014, my partner and I toasted all the usual things people do as they look ahead to the coming year. Health. Happiness. Love. Optimism. Hope.
To that traditional list, we added one more: Obamacare. My husband, Miles, was enrolled in what appeared to be an excellent, affordable plan at the stroke of midnight. Celebration seemed in order.
It had been a tough slog, of course. We’d worried the GOP would succeed in defunding it or undermining it in some other way that would put affordable coverage further out of our reach. Then we’d wrestled with that horrific website, struggled to understand the choices before us and waited nervously after we did so to see if the insurance card would actually materialize. It did.
On Jan. 1, we rejoiced. And on Jan. 10, we gave up.
Ten days in, we decided to cancel Miles’ Obamacare plan, swallow hundreds of dollars we’ll probably never recover and buy him a private policy away from the Federal Health Insurance Exchange Marketplace. His new plan does benefit from many requirements of the Affordable Care Act as well, so that’s good.
But even the administrators at Obamacare’s headquarters have agreed this is the best option. Really.
That’s not how it was supposed to be. After dozens of hours of phone calls that displaced my usual work obligations this week, only one thing is clear: Nobody can give anybody a straight or consistent answer to anything.
Our troubles may strike some as trivial and particular, although they wouldn’t if it happened to them. And anyone who wants a successful system – as we do – must understand that these nightmares are happening across the nation to the very people who want Obamacare to work.
Most just don’t have a way to tell the world.
In the summer of 2013, Miles and I, both 41 years old, quit our jobs in Washington. Miles was a producer at WJLA, the ABC affiliate in Washington D.C., but he longed to return to school for a new degree and a different career. I was at POLITICO realizing that my life as a freelance journalist was far more engaging, empowering and lucrative than chronicling the petty, overly intertwined worlds of D.C. politics and journalism.
Even a year earlier, it would have been unthinkable for Miles to walk away from a proper job. He has pre-existing conditions. None are life-threatening or unmanageable, but one requires expensive medication.
This is one of the promises of Obamacare we most appreciated, the idea that unshackling health decisions from employment can liberate people to leave unsatisfying jobs and engage their entrepreneurial sides. How many people have been prevented from pursuing careers that would make them more productive and passionate out of fear that a health calamity could ruin them?
Obamacare helped to embolden Miles to change his life. It is why we left Washington and headed back to the Midwest, a region we came to love while I had an academic fellowship at University of Michigan in 2011 and 2012. I wanted to freelance, write books and teach, and he wanted to go back to school.
We made our move when we did because the academic year was coming, figuring we could shoulder a few months of COBRA coverage for Miles – about $420 a month – until Obamacare began.
(With no important pre-existing conditions, I got a very good private plan right away through Aetna for about $210 a month. It’s evidently Obamacare-compliant, because I liked my plan and, as the applause line goes, I was able to keep it.)
Shortly after midnight on Oct. 1, we hopped onto healthcare.gov to see what the federal exchange had for Miles. As you may have heard, that didn’t go so well. When I wrote about that first-day misadventure of glitches and unhelpful phone assistance for New York Magazine, my liberal friends attacked me for judging too soon and providing anti-Obamacare fodder to the haters.
But to us, this really is not about politics. It’s about our lives. Miles and I support health reform because we believe that, executed correctly, it can liberate people to pursue their highest and best purposes. As recently as a week ago, that was the angle of a piece I pitched to Time.Com, where I regularly contribute.
And then Jan. 3 happened.
We struggled with the healthcare.gov website for months. Every so often, we’d return to find Miles’ application for eligibility stuck in some “pending” netherworld. The Phone People said to wait a few weeks and try again. Nothing ever happened, except that the site said at varying times the application was “in progress” or “incomplete.” I lost count of how many times I re-entered the same information because some Phone Person told me to try that.
The deadline to sign up was Dec. 23, so by Dec. 20 we were frantic. I finally broke down and called the Obamacare navigators in our region, the folks supposedly deputized to guide helpless souls to the finish line. Only two of the five I reached out to even responded, one to say she’d be on vacation for the rest of the year (?!?) and the other to say she was booked solid with other desperate customers. I guess we were supposed to know that the website would never, ever work and plan ahead for that.
The second lady did help, though. She suggested we create a whole new account for Miles because the old one, created in the earliest days of the troubled site, might be corrupted and stuck in some digital purgatory. I did that — and, gosh darn it, it worked. Well, sort of.
It turned out that Miles, despite planning to be a student and not expecting to have much income, did not qualify for any subsidy. We received a document supposedly explaining why, but it looked like this to us:
We kept asking the Phone People why. They suggested we download it again or log out and log in again or wait an hour and try again or reboot our computers. I was surprised nobody recommended a little club soda.
On Dec. 21, with two days to go, we shrugged off the perplexing notion that the ACA actually does not provide help for people who have low incomes. Maybe we could figure out an appeal or, perhaps, our accountant could figure it out later.
Subsidy or no, Obamacare offered Miles a seemingly terrific deal: $246 a month for health insurance with a $1,650 deductible through the Blue Care Network, a Michigan subsidiary of Blue Cross Blue Shield. This was comforting; Miles’ COBRA policy from his WJLA job was under BCBS and our coverage at University of Michigan was under Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan. His doctor was in the plan, the price was good, the benefits and co-pays seemed adequate. At long last, he had his coverage. Done.
We should’ve known new problems lurked, but it was Christmas and we wanted to be merry. Then, on Dec. 27, I realized the $30 per month dental plan I chose for Miles offered no dentists within a 20-mile radius of our home. When I ventured back into the morass of healthcare.gov to pick another one, the site wouldn’t let me. A Phone Person explained that if I changed the dental plan, it would also invalidate Miles’ medical plan, too, and he wouldn’t be able to start any coverage until Feb. 1. I left the dental plan as it was; the Phone Person told me I could come back in January and change it.
The Phone Person lied. They lie a lot. And this would become very important later.
Three days into 2014, Miles took his Obamacare out for its maiden drive. His stop at the doctor went fine. At the pharmacy, it crashed.
His medication — which has cost us a co-pay of between $10 and $30 under every other plan he’s had since 2004 including one under Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan — would not be covered. At all.
That’s $438 out of pocket. Every month. And it won’t even go against the plan deductible.
In other words, this nifty $246 Obamacare plan would actually cost $686 a month.
Miles put the $438 on a credit card, all the while wondering what someone without a credit card would have done in the face of going without important medication. He, like most Americans, assumed the insurer’s word, via the pharmacist, was final. Also, it was late on a Friday, a blizzard and epic cold snap bore down on us and he couldn’t know when he’d be able to go get it again.
The Pollyanna in me was sure this was some mistake. We spent a lovely weekend watching the snow pile up, confident that the matter would be handled in a call or two whenever business resumed after the storm and polar vortex.
Instead, it turned out to be all I did all last week. My work deadlines got pushed back, interviews rescheduled, emails unreturned. Day after day, I found myself on lengthy calls with countless Phone People trying to understand why this very common medication, covered under every plan Miles has ever had, was now about to become a significant monthly expense. Every time I hung up believing I understood something, it would be contradicted by something else in my notes or some lapse in logic. So I’d call again, and I’d get some other Phone Person who would blindfold me, spin me around a few more times and let me grope for the donkey’s tail yet again.
One thing remained consistent: Miles’ medication was not in the “formulary” anymore. I’d never heard that term, either, but it’s the document in which insurers state what they will cover and at what level.
From there, the situation made progressively less sense. The Obamacare Phone People offered no information or explanation, only a mild scolding that I should have checked the formulary before I signed Miles up for this plan. They couldn’t have been nicer — or more useless.
The Blue Care Phone People, however, were aggressively obnoxious and unhelpful. Time and again, they came up with different answers I would later learn to be wrong: that Miles had exceeded his lifetime limit of a component of the medication (creative, but false), that the Affordable Care Act forced the medication off the formulary (mostly false), that the FDA had pulled the medication from use (made up out of thin air), that no insurer was allowed to cover it anymore (big fat lie).
One Blue Care Phone Lady read off a list of other medications for the same condition that the doctor could prescribe, including the same medication in a different form. That was a possibility, but that wasn’t what Miles’ doctor wants him to take.
Much more troubling than the fact that we received so much worthless and conflicting information was that there was nobody to appeal to, nobody to trust.
For days, I attempted to obtain a credible, consistent answer as a “normal” person. Then, realizing how futile that was, I contacted the public relations offices of both Blue Care Network and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the Health and Human Services division administering the Affordable Care Act. I explained I was chronicling this experience because thousands of people must be encountering similar frustrations.
The CMS folks promised to gather the information I requested, and I did get some. I sent one spokeswoman the illegible eligibility document that showed only pages of weird symbols; she opened it on her computer just fine. I sent her screenshots of what I saw, she acknowledged that this was weird and faxed me the actual document. It did explain that Miles didn’t qualify for a subsidy because his expected student income was so low that he should apply for Medicaid. That seems like an easy enough, perhaps even reasonable, answer. Why couldn’t any of the many Obamacare Phone People have told us that? And is it really possible I was the only one having trouble opening the document properly?
Nobody from Blue Care Network responded to my request for information or an interview.
When the Blue Care Phone People claimed the FDA and/or Obamacare had banned this form of Miles’ medication, I became skeptical. If that had been so, it would’ve been a gigantic medical news story given the millions who take this medication, but it wasn’t. So I logged onto my Aetna account to check if my policy covered it. I learned it was considered generic and would cost not $438 but a whopping $15. Huh. I called Aetna; a Phone Person confirmed this. Their “formulary” still included the drug. We were more baffled than ever.
Aetna had plans on the federal marketplace as well, so I returned to HealthCare.gov to seek out a different plan for Miles. The site, however, incorrectly — surprise! — believed Miles hadn’t yet enrolled in the plan he was in.
Thus, I found myself back on the line with an Obamcare Phone Person. This time, however, I was told that once someone is enrolled in a plan via the marketplace, they cannot change it until the next open enrollment period in November. The only time to change plans, I learned, was before we paid the first premium.
This was news. In late December, remember, I had asked about changing the dental plan. I had been told then that I couldn’t do so without canceling the medical plan as well and postponing coverage to February. All we could do, they said, was cancel our plans. We were stuck.
All of this was passed along to CMS’s publicists, who vowed repeatedly to provide answers. They promised, that is, until they changed their minds. On Wednesday, I received some boilerplate information and a note: “Unfortunately, nobody is available for an interview.” The material they sent was clearly cut-and-pasted off HealthCare.gov – an explanation of why we couldn’t change our plans and how we should have known that this common medication would not be covered in our plan. There was a line in there about a three-day appeals process when a medication is denied; this was the first time in countless phone calls or emails that anyone even suggested there was such a process. Shouldn’t that have been the first thing the Obamacare Phone People said?
It was time to get out of the Obamacare fun house.
Our math had changed. Initially we hoped to get Miles a plan for less than the $421 cost of his COBRA. Now Miles was stuck in an Obamacare plan for $246 plus $438 out of pocket for his medications. Anything less than $690 a month was now a bargain.
Miles hadn’t been able to get covered independently in 2013 because of his pre-existing conditions, but the ACA now prohibits that exclusion. And I knew from earlier research that Aetna covers his medication. So I called Aetna. They had an excellent plan for Miles for $335 a month that we could start in February. It was outside the federal exchange and wasn’t eligible for any subsidies but, at this point, so what?
Knowing this restored a modicum of confidence in the ACA. Without it, Aetna wouldn’t — as we learned in 2013 — offer Miles any plan at all. So we were grateful, at least, for that.
But I still needed answers, so we held off on signing on with Aetna. Why did Aetna cover the drug but Blue Care didn’t? Why didn’t Blue Care cover the drug when every other Blue Cross Blue Shield plan Miles had had did? Why were we told we couldn’t change the dental plan and still have coverage on Jan. 1? How do we cancel our Obamacare plan?
After CMS’s no-comment email, I offered a respectful but pointed reply: “Thanks for trying. This system, which I toasted on Jan. 1 and had such high hopes for, is unraveling. I hope you understand that. If you with your access can’t obtain actual answers to these very common problems, there is no hope for it.”
That actually dislodged something. The next morning, Tony Dawson, a specialist from CMS’s Center For Consumer Information and Insurance Oversight division called. He listened to the whole story. His conclusion was startling: He agreed that our best course would be to dump our Obamacare plan and buy the Aetna one.
Dawson was sympathetic and, dare I say, honest. He reiterated that we couldn’t change plans in the exchange, but he said he would see about getting special permission to switch dental plans because I had tried before the deadline and had received incorrect information.
He also offered a plausible answer to the mystery of the formulary. Insurers write their own formularies. Neither the FDA nor the Affordable Care Act forced them to remove this medication. It was likely, however, that Blue Care made the change in part during negotiations with CMS regarding what plans would be made available on the exchange.
Dawson said he would find out why the drug had been dropped. I asked how fast he could do so; he said it would take a quick email. I explained I had a Jan. 15 deadline to enroll Miles with Aetna and be covered for February.
The most refreshing part of the conversation with Dawson was his acknowledgement that normal people, buying health insurance, usually don’t think to request the formulary to check on whether a common drug is covered. The boilerplate material that had been provided by CMS suggested the formulary had been easily accessible when we were browsing for plans, but I went back and saw that it actually is still not available on HealthCare.gov. (In mid-December, Forbes writer Scott Gottlieb wrote that the formularies were usually not available as people chose their plans, and he warned people with certain chronic conditions in need of expensive medication might face sticker shock at the pharmacy.)
Anyhow, Dawson promised to get back to me, and he did. He called Monday to confirm this form of the medicine wasn’t covered and our best choice was, in fact, to dump our plan.
On Jan. 10, I signed Miles up for the Aetna plan and called Blue Care to cancel. A Phone Person said they can’t do it, that policies created through the exchange had to be canceled through the exchange.
I called the Obamacare line. This Phone Person apologized at the outset because the “system is down,” so he wouldn’t be able to access Miles’ account. Nonetheless, how could he help me?
“We want to cancel this policy,” I told him.
“Oh, we can’t do that,” he said.
“You what?”
“I can’t cancel policies,” he said. “I suggest you call the insurance company. They’re the only ones who can do it.”
“But they just told me to call you.”
“I’m sorry, that’s not something we can do here.”
I know it’s rude, but I just hung up without saying goodbye. It was all I could do to avoid saying something cruel and regrettable to a poor soul who may or may not be right.
I figured if Dawson ever called me back, maybe he could straighten this out. Otherwise, Blue Care will drop us sooner or later when they realize we’re not giving them our money anymore.
Some may boil our misadventures down to its core, a bratty dirge by privileged whiners who don’t even need Obamacare and are sore they couldn’t get their medication covered. But that’s just it — we, too, need and want more affordable health care. We are precisely the kind of folks they need to make these exchanges work. If it’s all poor, very sick people, Obama can kiss his legacy goodbye.
What’s more, we have the time and initiative to dig for answers. As journalists, we could tap on the shoulders of people who ought to know, but that failed, too. Even with the looming prospect of being subject to this sort of publicity, nobody could give us complete, prompt or useful information. How are people who don’t badger public figures for a living, people who have no other option than to contend with Phone People, supposed to work it out?
But this isn’t merely a failure of government — though it is that. It’s also a failure of the private sector in the form of the insurance industry. They’ve received an unbelievable gift, a government-backed money-minting machine on an epic scale. Nobody really likes them, either. This is their chance, too. And their Phone People are no better despite being significantly more experienced. Their media spokespeople were even less responsive than the government’s, and that’s a pretty low bar.
Come November, we’ll check back and see what Obamacare plans are available for 2015. We want the ACA to work; the previous status quo certainly did not.
Right now, though, it’s time to move on. It’s easy to shrug that these are the expected growing pains of a massive new system. That’s probably true. But in real time, it is destructive to our finances and potentially bad for our health.
The president promised a system that would make obtaining insurance as easy as buying a book on Amazon.com. Instead, he gave us – so far, anyhow – one that’s about as easy as getting the NSA to stop listening to our phone calls.
“Of course, most of them are too high to even care about insurance and just show up at the ER with no intention of paying any bill.”
People keep saying stuff like that, or look at these two liberal homos struggling with this, ha ha.
But Cincinatus’wife is correct, it’s not just the dysfunctional and/or the obama supporters who are going to be mal-affected by this law. It is EVERYBODY. And it may do the most harm to the functional - as they will be expected to either pay through the nose or suffer the consequences.
Just look at the people in this piece, one guy was fine, had cheap insurance, the other guy had a problem (or presumably would have had a problem) getting coverage due to his health issues. Wasn’t there some way to help the second guy out without disrupting the entire system for everyone and making sure 2 gay guys have all the free birth control they will never, ever use?
This ‘herd’ is waiting for single payer. If they’re pissed off it’s because they’re still having to pay ‘something’ for healthcare.
This ‘couple’ always had the opportunity to ‘pursue their dreams’ while paying for their healthcare. That they chose not to says a lot about what they think THEY need to pay for vs. what someone ELSE should pay for them.
Their hatred of Obamacare isn’t that they’re having to pay something and that it’s screwed up. Their hatred is that it’s the INSURANCE company ‘phone people’ screwing up and the fact that they’re required to pay anything AT ALL.
I’ve seen this narrative in countless comment sections over the past 3 or 4 weeks. The idea that the reason the insurance companies had this much leeway was the dims trying to get the ‘corporatist’ republicans to ‘buy into’ obamacare at the beginning and make it a bipartisan deal. Clearly the republicans did NOT. Now the job of the left is to demonize the insurance companies for ‘taking advantage’ of the special perks put in by the dims to lure the republicans.
Note how easy it would be, from the article, for the ‘husband’ to simply sign up with medicaid and be done with it.
Why didn’t he? Because there wouldn’t have been fodder to demonize the insurance companies in a nifty little article like this one.
The goal of the left is medicaid for all. I give the insurance companies 5 years, max, before they all go under. Else we’ll be subsidizing them to the tune of trillions and it’ll amount to the same thing, budgetwise.
Two aging pajama boys encountering some semblance of reality for the first time in their lives. I can’t help but be amused.
what I thought was key was they both supported Obamacare because they wanted to quit their jobs where they had insurance coverage and pursue new careers, and that having ACA Obamacare would give them the safety net to do it.
What struck me, beyond your observation, was these are prime demographic bot supporters for whom nothing is working as promised, yet the writer still wants to see it succeed.
Note that the passive *husband* is eligible for Medicaid, where his meds will be provided, but they don’t want that.
Note also, many gays married in order for one to be eligible for the others health insurance policy, but now, there are fewer and fewer policies which provide spousal coverage. As employers have to change their offerings, even without the employer mandate, fewer and fewer will be able to offer spousal coverage or family coverage options.
In every one of these articles, the victims of zer0care state their implicit belief in the *idea* and reassert their passionate support for the Democrat Party.
“...because they wanted to quit...”
Exactly. Remember what Nancy said...?
“(CNSNews.com) – House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said Thursday that Obamacare facilitates the type of “liberation” that the “Founders had in mind” because it allows you to quit your job and become a “photographer,” a “writer,” a “musician”—or “whatever.”
Does anyone see the insanity of an insurance company being forced to pay out hundreds of dollars per month more for drugs for a “chronic” illness (unnamed)than they collect in premiums.
These people obviously need some financial assistance for their medications, but we are screwing up the entire healthcare delivery system to accommodate these minorities who are otherwise uninsurable on a voluntary basis.
Simple solution is locally run health clinics funded by taxes. Most people in the country live in counties that have this type of service for poor people or the uninsured. And the participants are charged what they can pay according to thier income.
Another liberal gets mugged LMAO!!!!
In my mind, I substituted “Stephanie” for Steve as I was reading the article. That enabled me to get through it.
I’ve heard there is some buzz about the House legislating to block insurance bailouts — that then watch the ins. cos turn on a dime.
What have you heard about this in the last few weeks?
I KNOW the House leadership and the GOP-e contingent is less than worthless, but is there anything to this?
That was my crutch too.
Check your pings. I pinged you to an article about just that.
IMHO there are no good guys in this. Insurance companies were big supporters of obamacare because they were salivating at the thought of a guaranteed income stream. A mandated guaranteed income stream. Either via paying customers, or outright bailouts.
Government, as we all know, was planning on being the single provider all along. Either directly, or indirectly via the insurance companies.
Why would his husband qualify for his income to be seperate from the writer? Didn’t it list that Miles was eligible for medicaid? Wouldn’t his income be lumped together with the husband?
If Steve and his husband think they have problems now, just wait until their identities are hacked...
Nah. They'll just get put on Medicaid. No problem.
bflr
I know libs here and they all state their faith in the Federal government to get it right eventually, given enough $$$$ (which they see as unlimited ) and determination.
There is an amazing similarity between Dems and Obamacare and Republicans and the Iraq invasion, many Republicans still believe that we could straighten that place out with unlimited time and $$$$..
One of Obama’s main campaign promises in 2008 was to ‘get us out of Iraq’ which Hillary ran on too,
cant help wonder if GOP candidates in 2016 will be running on ‘Get us out of Obama-care’
“In the summer of 2013, Miles and I, both 41 years old, quit our jobs in Washington. Miles was a producer at WJLA, the ABC affiliate in Washington D.C., but he longed to return to school for a new degree and a different career. I was at POLITICO realizing that my life as a freelance journalist was far more engaging, empowering and lucrative than chronicling the petty, overly intertwined worlds of D.C. politics and journalism.”
Oh crikes!!! This is all I need to know. Two Obots with fantastic jobs in state run media in the middle of a depression just up and quit. Now they are boo hooing because they can’t get new insurance same as the old insurance. How many people would have killed to get off unemployment and get a job like these two had?
In a system where the Central Government, i.e., the State, collects all the money from those with ability, and redistributes the money to the community, each according to their need, comes damn close to what Karl Marx decreed for his Commune-Style Utopia, to wit:
“FROM EACH ACCORDING TO HIS ABILTY, TO EACH ACCORDING TO HIS NEED.”
Currently that system of redistribution creates all of the US Federal Budget Defecit every year: 40 % of all Federal spending is spent on Welfare, and 40 % of Federal Spending is borrowed.
America was founded on FREEDOM OF CHOICE, which our Founders called LIBERTY.
During our Civil War, we as a Society, chose to confuse the difference between Freedom and Liberty, and that confusion exists to this day.
Freedom leads to Anarchy if accountability is not imposed. Liberty includes accountability for ones actions or inactions.
Obamacare is a mandatory edict from the Central Government that restricts all of our medical insurance choices, and thus restricts our Liberty.
We choose who we want to represent us, and they choose what freedoms of choice they want to deny us, and thus how much Liberty they choose for us to lose.
Total Freedom of Choice leads to anarchy, whereas Liberty contains the discipline of accountability for ones actions or inactions.
For example, in a system based on total Freedom, I may choose to trip you as I walk past you, knowing that I will not be held accountable for my actions or for any harm that comes to you.
In a system based on Liberty, I know that if I trip you that I will be obligated to apologize, pay for any damages to you, and provide a significant extra compensation to you as an example to others as to why they should not consider harming others.
Each Regulation that our Representatives place on us reduces our Freedom of Choice, and thus our Liberty.
As a Society fails, fewer and fewer people are held accountable for their actions, or lack of actions.
This in turn causes the well-meaning Representatives to pass more and more Regulations that decrease more and more of our Freedom of Choices and thus our Liberty.
In time, the Regulations become more relied upon than Laws, as the sense of accountability all but disappears, as is true today, IMHO.
At some point Anarchy becomes dominant, Regulations cease to maintain order, and the Central Government assumes all control.
_____________________
In summary, in the continuum from total Freedom to Dictatorial Slavery, there is one small sweet spot of civilized behavior, one set of Checks and Balances that was devised by our Founding Fathers. It is unique and precious to all who love Liberty.
That set of Checks and Balances has not been used in this Century by the Representatives that we have elected.
Thus, it is incumbent on we, the people, to hold our dysfunctional Representatives accountable for their lack of action for not using the Checks and balances that we play them to use.
Hence, it has been very easy to take over the Federal Government by a few men and women who oppose Freedom of Choice, acceptability and Liberty, because they knew that the Congressional Republicans would not use their Constitutional Checks and Balances.
“Evil trumps cowardice every time.”
That is the general outline of our fallen US Federal Government today, where one political party was able to impose a mandatory tax over the objection of 85 % of the population, and do it without effective objection in just 11 months.
Apply whatever political system names to what I have described, as they are all degrees of Slavery that History shows will not end well.
Exactly.
As P.J. O'Rourke once so sagely observed, "If you think medical care is expensive now, just wait until it's free!". Our husband and his husband ain't seen nothin' yet!
If you want to see our future, don't look to the NHS. Britain still has a modicum of private payer available. Look to the Soviet "health care" system instead.
You'll be a lot better off going to your Vet's office for your health care needs. Maybe take your hamster to the local hospital instead if you don't care much what happens to him?
Or, if you are really desperate and decide to go to a "doctor", make sure you take a healthy bribe with you if you want to be anything other than ignored or butchered. But don't expect the consultation to be in any sort of English you can understand.
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