The joys of nationalized healthcare

The British National Health Service:

When I arrive, I am greeted by an empty reception desk but there is a push button ‘satisfaction’ survey machine whereby I can register the fact that I am being kept waiting.

My presence is eventually acknowledged and I am given a heap of forms mostly concentrating on my ethnic group, country of origin and other matters of social categorisation. I am then seated in an airport departure lounge-style waiting area with joined-together seats, facing a television screen showing episodes of Will & Grace. The patients sit in rows not laughing. Clearly there are limits to the ability of even Paramount Comedy to put smiles on faces.

After not too long, I am taken into a small room where a doctor in her early twenties examines me and tells me she has no idea. I will need more tests, for which there will be a several-hour wait. I press her for any hint of reassurance she may be able to give me which will get me through these worrying next few hours. She shakes her head and intimates that when she says she has no idea, she means she really has no idea.

And so I am dispatched, quietly hysterical with fear, to the section of the radio-graphy unit set aside for women’s things. No sooner am I through the door with my supermarket cheese counter-style ticket — number 73 — than I see this is not going to be easy. All the other women have brought their husbands with them. Possibly they imagined they would be told to wait outside. But it seems the NHS has no hang-ups when it comes to us all just hanging out of hospital gowns together, Sixties summer of love-style. I watch with my mouth open as I witness the routine I am to be subjected to. As each woman’s number is called they are taken to a cubicle with a flimsy curtain almost drawn across, but not quite, and told to take off their clothes and put on a gown. I can see, and so assume the men can, most of what is going on behind the curtain. The half-dressed women then come back out and awkwardly sit down, perhaps next to their husband, perhaps next to another man.

The ward is run by two terrifying women called ‘lead superintendent radiographers’ who sit in offices with the doors permanently wedged open.

As Churchill said:

“Socialism is a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy, its inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery.”