Cancer patients notionally entitled to free healthcare in high-tax Britain are being forced to pay for chemotherapy privately in record numbers due to backlogs and interminable waiting lists.
The Private Healthcare Self-Pay UK Market Report by LaingBuisson, a firm which furnishes the British government’s Office for National Statistics (ONS) with market data, found that monthly privately-funded sessions of chemotherapy treatment hit a record 13,200 in 2021 — a measurable rise on the 10,000 recorded in early 2019, before the coronavirus pandemic and associated lockdowns threw the socialised healthcare system into more chaos than usual.
“There is a direct correlation between the well-publicised and lengthening NHS [National Health Service] waiting times for elective procedures and diagnostics and enquiries around self-pay,” said the author of the report, Liz Heath, in comments quoted by The Telegraph.
“Since those waiting lists are not falling, we would expect demand to be sustained as people seek to access treatment,” she added.
“We are in the grip of the most serious cancer care crisis ever and cancer is so time-critical that more patients are paying to get the care they need,” commented top oncologist Professor Pat Price, describing the rising self-pay figures as “shocking”.
Of course, many working- and lower-middle-class Britons will be unable to resort to self-pay to circumvent long waiting lists even if they would like to, due to financial constraints.
Maternity Care In Socialised National Health Service Deemed Unsafe After Official Reporthttps://t.co/SX9O0Cz8uR
— Breitbart London (@BreitbartLondon) April 1, 2022
The NHS, as is its custom, provided a comment to The Telegraph not really addressing the concerns around people paying for their own treatment in record numbers and instead merely threw out a lot of numbers designed to portray it in a positive light.
“In February alone NHS staff saw over 220,000 people who had been referred urgently with suspected cancer, 25,000 people started a first treatment for cancer, and a further 8,000 people started chemotherapy – 99 per cent of them within a month of a decision to treat,” a spokesman for the state healthcare provider insisted.
The International Cancer Benchmarking Partnership (ICBP) of countries with similar healthcare systems — namely Britain, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Denmark, Norway, and Ireland — has found that Britain has the worst or close to the worst survival rates for all cancers analysed.
Given recent moves by the NHS to push GPs (General Practitioners, or family doctors) to try and fob prospective patients off with advice and guidance instead of referrals for hospital care in order to try and artificially reduce backlogs and waiting lists, it seems unlikely its issues with late diagnosis — a contributor to the relatively poor survival statistics — will be resolved in the near future.
General Practitioners (GPs) in Sussex will get £178 per year in taxpayer cash for every person they sign up to take “cross-sex hormone therapy” and an additional £91 a year for annual health checks for transgender, non-binary, and intersex (TNBI) patients https://t.co/d1YJmOoLen
— Breitbart London (@BreitbartLondon) April 3, 2022
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