[DanBC]

> had to wait YEARS for their number to be called.

They could have paid and gone privvate at any time. While wait lists were terrible some time ago they have got a lot better. Since year 2000 wait lists have been consistantly targetted for action by a variety of governments. There are some dodgy actions by some hospitals, but these are called out as dodgy and people take action to prevent it. Patients have maximum wait times listed in national documentation.

> They also limit the availability to the best medications and procedures to keep costs down.

I'm not sure what your point is. Imagine A and B, where A is shown to work effectively and B isn't. Which would you want? In this situation I'm glad that people have a responsibility to evaluate the research to weed out very expensive and inefficient medication and proceedures (and that's really what they're doing. They stop a small number of very expensive and ineffective meds; they don't just allow a small number of cheap meds.)

> Also the quality is also quite poor

How are you measuring quality?

> hundreds of people in the UK have died of dehydration in the hospital because the staff forgot to give them water.

Hundreds sounds too high. Do you have a cite for that please? (Note that the Mirror or the Mail will cause much mirth and laughter and people will then ignore anything else you say.)

While we're talking about deaths from incompetence: Yes, it happens. Yes, it kills distressing many people. It also happens in the US. Medical error is the 3rd biggest cause of death in the US. About 7,000 people die each year in the US because clinicians make a mistake with the medication. About 12,000 people die from unnecessary surgery. About 20,000 die from other errors. Nosocomial (Hospital aquired) infection kills another 80,000 people in the US. About 100,000 people get the right quantity of the right meds, but die from side-effect complications.

There are some things US health care does better. But the UK has better outcomes for some things. We also spend less money on our healthcare than the US.

(http://www.nursingtimes.net/a-comparison-of-british-and-us-m...)

[paulhauggis]

"They could have paid and gone privvate at any time."

Once you have government health care in place, private care costs get so high, only the rich can afford them.

[DanBC]

I'm not so sure that's true. I think prices compare pretty well with the US. Here's one website found pseudorandomly via a web search. (http://www.bmihealthcare.co.uk/paying-for-yourself)

Notice that they offer many surgeries "at a fixed price" and that all costs are known before surgery starts. I'm not sure what happens if there are complications; whether those are covered or not.

(I would have called them to get a quote, but they're not open yet.)

[chc]

The United States has had this situation for a long time, despite healthcare being almost entirely private.

[arethuza]

"private care costs get so high, only the rich can afford them"

That is most certainly not the case - private health care is a fairly common perk for senior positions in many companies (I get it and I'm two layers away from a CxO).