Fight Dependency

Research indicates that, despite cost cutting exercises within the NHS, the healthcare offered in the UK is keeping a higher percentage of the people alive for longer. A lotl has been mentioned about the financial implications of an aging population in reference to pension expenses and a rise in care support as more people live into old age and have the unavoidable health problems which mean that they have to be cared for by the state.

Whilst fully appreciative of the problems that the NHS is having to cope with, I do speculate as to whether some of their practices are really false economies. Yes, obviously operations are costly, but if an ailment can be alleviated by operating and the benefits then prevent the patient from needing any additional medical care for that issue for several years, surely the two treatment plans should be balanced out against each other.

Let me cite a perfect example. I have an acquaintance who is in her thirties and who now has severe arthritis in both knee joints. By severe, I mean that she is in constant pain, has serious problems using stairs, can only walk limited distances extremely slowly and is therefore registered as disabled by the government. Her situation could be solved by an operation to give her new knee joints, but the powers that be refuse to even consider that until she has reached her mid fifties. This is down to the fact that the replacement joints will eventually wear out too, so allegedly for this reason they will not do this operation more than once on the same person because of the cost.

So let’s consider how much the alternate cost will be to the state instead. They will have to fund an additional two decades of pain killing medication, and another two decades of appointments to see a specialist to monitor the worsening of the complaint. And as she is disabled she is limited as to the nature of work she can carry out and therefore doesn’t earn much, the state will be financing twenty years supply of medicines for her (for this problem as well as her other health issues), plus paying out another twenty years of disability living allowance, and free road tax on the car that she gets around in. Now, I have no clue as tohow much the total to fund the operation would be as against all of these other expenses, but twenty years worth of car tax alone would be a sizeable deposit to put towards some new knee joints.

A similar situation must also apply to many other people who have knee and hip problems. Obviously, it would be an expense now, but the likely savings to the authorities over quite a few years afterwards, coupled with a much enhanced quality of life for the patient should surely be something worth considering.

There is a similar scenario in the domain of eye care where Laser eye surgery is still pretty much carried out in the private sector and rarely offered to NHS patients who suffer with the most common eye complaints like short-sightedness and long-sightedness. A patient will most probably get their eyes tested quite regularly, and will almost certainly need new glasses most times. Especially for older patients, where the glasses are probably going to be partly funded by the authorities, there must surely be a case for funding one course of Laser eye treatment which could then potentially last them for the rest of their lives, especially when Laser eye surgery is such an easy process to execute.

I’m sure that there are numerous examples of surgical procedures where the initial cost of treatment prevents their use in all but very unusual cases, which is unfortunate for people who have to suffer. Possibly someone could create a ready reckoner that could compare the plus points of funding new joints now against twenty years of the costs mentioned above, or of one Laser eye treatment appointment compared to several pairs of glasses.

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Tags: health, improved vision, laser eye, laser eye surgery, lifefstyle