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Comment by mattlondon | Hacker News Reader

Sounds like you are paying for what the NHS in the UK will offer - they'll get you there but it is often slow and quite convoluted, but it is free!

Private care in the UK can be very fast - e.g. I went from an initial consultation with a doctor for "knee pain" to having two sessions with a consultant and an MRI complete and booked in for physiotherapy within 48 hours. Things are often done the same day or within 24-48 hour turnarounds, although sometimes you can only get seen by specific consultants on certain days (e.g. they only see people on wed + Fri etc) . I am not sure what the on-ramp for that is as I go through my work health insurance but presumably you can just pay out of pocket.

www.hcahealthcare.co.uk seems to be what everything my healthcare insurance (from a BigCo) goes through, so could be worth starting there if you fancy a visit to the UK.

Good luck.

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Unfortunately private care in the UK may not be so great when the NHS starts to fully break down

Can you elaborate please? Why will the private care in the UK suffer if NHS starts to break down?

And, will NHS really break down? I know it has been considered many times but enough of the population seems to be against the idea that I suspect it may not break down soon. Do you have any reason to believe it may break down?

Not the OP but most private healthcare in the UK is delivered by doctors, nurses and other healthcare practitioners who have either been trained by or are still working for the NHS. If you need anything more serious than minor surgery you are likely to be treated in an NHS facility by NHS staff, and many of your tests will be done in NHS labs, so even as a private patient you are still relying on the NHS being functional. Chunks of the NHS have already been privatised and compared to the systems in most other European countries it is chronically underfunded and has poor outcomes. Will it break down? Arguably it already is, but this is mostly due to a decade of ideologically driven cuts, two decades of part privatisation and three decades of continuous reorganisations that waste vast amounts of money and benefit no one.

I don't think that is imminent. They've been saying it has been on it's knees constantly since the 1990s at least (and probably longer but I personally cannot remember any further back). It got through Covid without collapsing aswell- I don't think it is going away any time soon.

>I don't think that is imminent. They've been saying it has been on it's knees constantly since the 1990s at least (and probably longer but I personally cannot remember any further back).

Private Eye on "24 Hours to Save the NHS" <https://twitter.com/KulganofCrydee/status/833654730849136641>

> It got through Covid without collapsing aswell

Where "not collapsing" means tens of thousands of people died preventable deaths and hundreds of thousands of people suffered preventable harm because the NHS wasn't able to provide healthcare in a timely fashion to everyone who needed it.

Where "not collapsing" means people now have ten-hour waits for ambos, or ten hour waits in an ambo outside ED departments.

Where "not collapsing" means massive cuts to the services provided, leaving people mostly without NHS dentistry, with limited access to GP care, with cancelled elective care, etc etc.

Where "not collapsing" means preventable child and mother deaths because of unsafe maternity units.

Watch the news for ambo services this week.

What's this if it's not collapse? https://twitter.com/SittonGary/status/1534148868396531712?s=...

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