Mar
Green healthcare: less doctors more bureaucrats
If you have a life threatening illness, what’s your priority–your carbon footprint or receiving treatment?
If you decide to set up a free healthcare service, what do you think you need most–a host of ‘green’ bureaucrats or doctors and nurses? I doubt you’d consider your priority would be to have someone investigating your carbon footprint as you’re clinging to life or hoping for treatment, but that’s the way it’s going in the UK.
Consider this from the the NHS’s Kidney Care website:
NHS Kidney Care is funding a one-year “Green Nephrology Fellowship” for a Specialist Registrar (SpR) to work on sustainability in kidney care.
That sounds like a stupid idea–employ a qualified doctor not to treat patients, and he’s just the first of many. Don’t think for one moment that the NHS isn’t spending taxpayer money on a myriad of consultancy firms as well, and in my research I even discovered there’s an NHS forest programme. Once anything becomes taxpayer funded, then it’s open season to invent jobs for problems that don’t exist.
If you question my qualification to make such a comment, I’ll confirm that I had, or have, kidney cancer, and I can also add that every step of my treatment by the NHS, from diagnosis beyond, was a disaster.
Okay, maybe I’m bitter and twisted, but I’m not alone. Amazingly, one UK hospital (here, here and here) has been responsible for more fatal casualties than the Taliban have inflicted on our troops in Afghanistan, but for some reason that’s accepted
The NHS bureaucracy is legendary, and by appointing a myriad of ‘green’ commissars all over it is only going to divert resources from patient care.
What’s this have to do with global warming? Not a whole lot, but it’s the same insane crowd pushing it, healthcare is a hot topic now, and I’m down a kidney.
Possibly related posts:
In the first House bill, there were many dollars allocated for “studies” Studies will not take out my appendix nor set a fracture. The largest job creater is sending GE money to set up a central data base. Loading all patient records from every source so they can fill cube farms that make decisions for doctors is expensive.
I’m going to be an alarmist myself and maybe I’m going over the top, but even I hadn’t realised how deeply this had infiltrated our health system.
Everything is carbon costed from treatment, even down to my travel. So at what stage does someone decide that your carbon cost is too great ? It’s giving the state control of every aspect of your treatment and the ability to decide you have outlived your carbon usefulness. You can also be compared country against country, so that you only get so much ‘carbon cost’ expended on you as another country.
It’s frightening and reminds me of that old UK TV series that starred Patrick MacGoohan – ‘The Prisoner’.
You think this doesn’t related to AGW? Ha! I manage to run a whole blog on the topic of climate alarmism in the health sphere.
Thanks for posting this. I am a skeptical medical student and have been blogging about the NHS green policies lately. I worried that I might have been a bit too harsh on the NHS, now I’m thinking perhaps I didn’t open the can o’ whoop arse enough.
Sadly, theres only too many young, impressionable doctors who would leap at the chance of any job with “sustainable” in the title. Eww, just frankly.
One of my most recent posts asked who would volunteer for the wind-powered dialysis machine. I thought I was joking at the time…
What makes medicine expensive?
[1] Huge piles of regulations requiring vast paperwork.
[2] Lawyers who will jump on you for the slightest reason.
[3] Lack of competition with doctors able to regulate who can practice and how many doctors.
[4] Expensive drugs.
[5] Expensive equipment.
What makes drugs expensive?
[1] Huge piles of regulations requiring vast paperwork.
[2] Lawyers who will jump on you for the slightest reason.
[3] Long and complex testing procedures, and more paperwork.
[4] Lack of competition with only a small handful of huge companies owning pretty much the entire industry.
[5] Expensive equipment.
What makes medical equipment expensive?
[1] Huge piles of regulations requiring vast paperwork.
[2] Lawyers who will jump on you for the slightest reason.
[3] Long and complex testing procedures, and more paperwork.
I think you can see where this is going. Probably the tight regulations do save some lives, but the high price tag that inevitably comes attached has no doubt cost vastly more lives. People are not free to make their own decisions regarding their own health, they have decisions handed down to them from on high. People do not have any practical alternative because every doctor (by law) must work to exactly the same system. The result is Central Planning by any other name, no real choices for the consumer, thus a guarantee of inefficiency.
People blame Obama for bringing in Socialist healthcare… too late, it came long ago. Obama is merely trying to add the finishing touches.
I’m from Australia by the way, we have had government sponsored health insurance for a long time and it used to work reasonably well. Gradually the whole thing is sinking under it’s own weight and the answer to every problem is more regulation, more administrators, more paper shuffling. The public hospitals have something like one computer for every 5 square meters of floorspace, and yet they cannot call up records of a hospital visit from 6 months ago (I have seen this with my own eyes). Our Health Minister spoke frankly and admitted that it is 10% cheaper for the government to just pay private hospitals to do the operations that are waiting to be done in the public hospitals rather than actually do the same operations in a public hospital. This is even after the public hospital system gets cheap labor by forcing young doctors to do internships for low wages (a bit like apprenticeships).