When the government takes over your health system, you can’t be surprised when it works on government time. In the UK, the National Health Service (largest health system and 4th largest employer in the world) pays its doctors for a set amount of annual work. So what happens when they meet their work quota?
Health service dentists have been forced to go on holiday or spend time on the golf course this month despite millions of patients being denied dental care.Many have fulfilled their annual work quotas allotted by the National Health Service and have been turning patients away because they are not paid to do extra work. This is despite the fact that more than 7m people in Britain are unable to find an NHS dentist.
That’s a great little system they have. A third of their dentists have met their quotas early and refused to perform any dentistry until April.
As far as the 7 million folk who can’t find a dentist go, consider that there are 51 million people in Britain. That means that 14% of population can’t access dental care. That’s awfully close to another number – 16%, which is the greatly exaggerated percentage of Americans without health insurance (based on the 45 million number that is incorrectly bandied about).
So the vaunted humane and just health care system of the UK is actually unable to provide dental care to 14% of its citizens, while in the US, only about 10% of residents (citizens and non-citizens) have unmet dental needs.
Once again the UK provides the invaluable service of showing us the perils of socialization.
