Riley interviews Dr. Allyson Pollock and Peter Roderick about the Health and Care Act

Well that was fucking depressing. I work in an NHS service that is about to be "privatised" and it's hellish. I'm about to get another NHS job but I fear that I'm just going to playing hide and seek from private service providers forever.

Correction, hospitals that accept US government funding (Medicare) are legally forbidden from turning away patients by a law called EMTALA. I am an ER nurse and we do wish we could turn away homeless patients who don’t need care but want a place to sleep during the pandemic or mentally Ill folks found wondering the streets but no one wants to pay to institutionalize them so they get dumped on hospital emergency rooms. The public complains about 12 hour waits for abdominal pain but they don’t see police bringing the homeless threatening self harm as a way to get a hospital bed to sleep in or the mentally Ill dumped on us. As emergency room doctors and nurses, we want to save life’s and relieve those that are suffering, but half of our patients are homeless threatening self harm so they can have a place to stay and food to eat, the mentally I’ll that society doesn’t want to spend taxes on to institutionalize, and drunks because the police no longer have drunk tanks to hold these people in so hospitals have to deal with violent drunks. And often times these people are frequent fliers as in the same people do make several visits a week to our emergency room or other hospitals near by. America is so dystopian that several private insurers have bought apartment buildings to give to the homeless as a way to anchor them to an address in order to provide (limited) assistance from NGOs so they will stop visiting the hospital Emergency Room several hundred times a year per patient seeking food and shelter. And since America is filled with ambulance chasing lawyers, we order several thousand dollars worth of diagnostics on homeless patients that we just discharged 24 hours ago whom we know are just here for food and shelter as a means to protect ourselves from lawsuits or accusations of discrimination. The general public doesn’t know that taxpayers pay private ambulances and hospitals for these visits, though it’s very little. Otherwise private or public hospitals would go bankrupt from these visits. Though hospitals in the US universally make their revenue from expensive surgeries. As during the freeze in surgeries during COVID brought many hospitals to the brink of bankruptcies. Showing how expensive everything medically related in the US is. And the non insurance, self payer list price for just walking into my unit (facility fee) is $3200. But that’s not even bad compared to the $200,000-$300,000 that some private equity owned helicopter ambulance services charge unwilling unconscious patients. And it’s quite funny how when I explain to my coworkers and patients how medical bankruptcy is not a word or even an understood concept in other countries, they literally can’t appreciate the point I am making. They can’t grasp the idea the other people in other countries can’t grasp the idea of medical bankruptcies.

As an American I find this darkly funny. Most of the Brits I've met are incredibly naïve, soft, veal crate beneficiaries of a social welfare state they do not understand or appreciate, who have no idea the level of deprivation and violence they will be exposed to once the last bulwarks of the British social welfare framework fail. They truly cannot imagine what life is like in America. A horrifying new dawn awaits the British public when they wake up to realize that yes, they can and will die of preventable illness because they cannot afford/access privatized medical care. Who's the colony now!?!?!? Mwahahahahah!!! Mwahahahahahahahahahah!!! **Coughs up phlegm because I cant afford asthma inhaler cartridges under my sub standard American health insurance plan** But seriously its maddening watching working class people take to the barricades over vaccine mandates, when if they realized the amount of suffering their own politicians were trying to bring them through NHS privatization they should have been off the walls angry with Westminster over that instead. There is a conspiracy to kill working class Brits, but its not coming from vaccine makers, its coming from American health insurance lobbyists who want to cut off medical care to the poor.

Milo voice: "IT'S THE DETAILED POLICY DISCUSSIONS ONE!"

Sorry you're getting American health insurance as regional healthcare districts.

fwiw, bit rate seems a tad high, I'm getting 369MB for 32 min

tyvm!