There has never been a truer saying than your health is your wealth. Coming from Scotland where not only is health care free, but prescriptions are too. Settling into a country which doesn't have free healthcare takes a while to get used to. Here in Ireland you pay for a visit to GP and hospital, even paying a fee when you arrive at accident and emergency.
Before moving here I naively thought this would dissuade people from being hypochondriacs. In actual fact it doesn't, since virtually everyone has health insurance. The result is that hospitals and GPs are as full and overworked as they are in Scotland. To the extent recently that patients couldn't even be taken off ambulances as there wasn't any trolleys for them.
There are a number of other similarities in the two healthcare systems. One of which is that neither have endless financial resources. In both systems people need to take a look at what they have, and be grateful to the people who work in the respective health systems. After all everyone has to take some responsibility for their own health. People should use it when they really need to and not when they have a sniffle, or sprain a wrist.
This has never been more important than now.
The National; Health Service in the UK is a fantastic service, which is envied by people the world over, partly because it is free at the point of delivery. In Ireland there is a health system of a different type which works, and as the new President in America dismantles Obamacare without anything to replace it. It is important that wherever people have an affordable healthcare system; it mustn't be abused so that it lasts the test of time.
No comments:
Post a Comment