Here’s yet another story proponents of socialized medicine will find a bit inconvenient. A woman in Great Britain needed hip surgery. She applied for the surgery to be done in the national health care system she’d been paying taxes to support. She was told by the bureaucrats in that system that she was too fat to have her hip replaced, so she was forced to raise money so she could travel to another country and pay for the procedure herself.
This would be money spent over and above the money she paid in taxes to fund the national health care system which was supposed to meet all her medical needs.
She then came back to her home country and sued her national health service plan to get the money she spent back. Her case is yet to be decided. But perhaps the most chilling part of this whole ordeal is this:
The PCT had refused her treatment because of its policy of not providing surgery to most people with a body mass index of more than 35 unless they go through a weight-loss plan.
Basically, if some bureaucrat bean counter decides you’re too fat, you can’t get surgery in Great Britain. It doesn’t matter if you need the surgery or not, or that you paid for these services with your tax dollars. If you don’t conform to their standards you don’t get care.
What’s more, the tool they’re using to determine who is and is not fat is an archaic measure that is hardly accurate. Under body mass index measurements, people like professional football player Emmit Smith are “fat.” Along with people like Dwayne Johnson (a/k/a “The Rock), George W. Bush and Tom Cruise.
Could you imagine Tom Cruise not being able to get hip surgery in Great Britain...because he’s too fat? I’m not saying that being fat is a good thing. I’m just pointing out that socialized medicine is an awful, inefficient system that drives government bureaucrats to absurd lengths (like denying surgeries based on an outmoded obesity measure like BMI) in order to ration health services.
This is not something we, as Americans, should want to sign up for.