| "But the family members making that choice weren't footing the bill" That appears to be the crux of the problem: "footing the bill". It may sound counter intuitive but I have found that when cost is removed from the equation, then better decisions may arise or at least a few extra distortions are removed. When money is directly involved then there are several potential, and in my view damaging, extra approaches that might arise. There's the: "we've spent so much and achieved [something] so let's go all in." Or "we've only spent this much so let's go for gold" Or: "We are paying for this anyway and so let's give it a go". Health care systems that are funded by taxation ie pre-paid, in my view, escape those problems and encourage end of life scenarios that are more likely to be better (for a given value of better) I think that I am very lucky to have the UK's NHS to care for me. We pay for it nominally via a second income related tax called "National Insurance" - we also have a country wide "Income Tax". The NI rate is: https://www.gov.uk/national-insurance/how-much-you-pay - nominally 12% but is only levied on the first £x. It gets a bit complicated because employers also pay NI for their employees. The thing about an organisation like the National Health Service is that if you have one and you get hurt, you get it fixed without thinking about it too much. We do pay quite a lot for it but it works and the cost is not so noticeable compared to Income Tax. My dad had a few heart related snags a few years ago that involved a three week stay in Exeter General, then a helicopter flight to London and a six month stay in the Royal Brompton, mostly in their intensive care unit (ICU) which would have been horrendously expensive. One of the docs described how he massaged my Dad's heart in his hands when the bloody thing decided to get a bit weary of being fiddled with too much. The UK's NHS is not perfect or anywhere near perfect. It's a whopping great organisation with some good and some not so good staff and some horrendous bureaucracy. That said, I would prefer it to any other medical system. It works eventually and often works surprisingly well and often preemptively. Dad would be dead without it. Dad's GP practice missed a few clues. When his doc went on holiday, a Hospital Registrar (as it turns out) was drafted in to cover. Dad presented and his feet didn't touch the floor until he was in a hospital bed. Again, I have to emphasise that the UK's NHS is not perfect but I don't worry about what to do if my arm fell off or something. I get to A&E and they fix me up. I have also been at the far end of palliative care (Mum). Again the NHS did the business and did its best (cancer) but it had to accept defeat. That's when Hospice Care cuts in alongside the NHS. St Margarets were absolutely fantastic. In the end it is taxation that pays for this thing but the fact that you can forget about money when dealing with health care issues is quite important, I think. |
It remains a serious criminal offence in the UK to assist in suicide (suicide itself hasn't been a crime for decades).
> I think that I am very lucky to have the UK's NHS to care for me. We pay for it nominally via a second income related tax called "National Insurance" - we also have a country wide "Income Tax".
That is utterly incorrect. National Insurance is not ring-fenced; the money goes into the government's revenue pool, same as Income Tax. It can then be spent on weapons, wars, or subsidies for fossil-fuel industries.
NI is just a wheeze to allow governments to increase taxes on income without appearing to raise the rate of Income Tax. There's a reason the rate of NI has never gone down.
[Edit] I appear to be wrong: NI income doesn't go into the "general pool", at least not directly (it seems to be complicated).
NI is an obnoxious tax. It is capped; earnings over about £900 pw are untaxed. Pensioners are untaxed. So the burden falls most-heavily on less-well-off working people (the less you earn, the greater proportion of your earnings goes in NI).