Category Archives: Short Stories

I would first of all like to offer my condolences to the family of Brian Thomson the CEO of United Healthcare. My thoughts are with them and what I write below is meant as a cry for understanding of healthcare needs for everyone.

I feel for American Society that there is no such thing as a good quality public health service in the United States of America.

America voted and Americans said that health care would be a lottery and would be based on means and insurance.

As a result the head of a Health Insurance Company, United Healthcare, that no one in the UK has ever heard of is shot while walking back to his hotel. Perhaps most Americans know his Company and perhaps relatives and friends suffered at it’s hands due to non payment of claims. With American Gun Laws , the unfortunate but perhaps( to the killers eye culpable man)met his end in a cold blooded planned assassination. The bullets etched with words chillingly used to decline a Health Insurance Claim.

No Chief Executive Officer should die for running a business. CEO’s are numbers people responsible for reporting figures to their shareholders. Their moral compass may have skewed to the extent that they have lost all understanding of the effects purely looking at numbers and results and ignoring the “soft” issues like, people suffering uncontrollable pain through not being able to afford the drugs they need, or families being at their wits end with a very ill baby , who have stopped their insurance payments to keep food on the table. Those issues are not “soft” for those families.

America, now has the potential to turn into a cross between Victorian Britain with its’ paupers graves, workhouses and chronically poor people and the really bad bits of the Wild West( If you didn’t agree with someone you’d shoot them.) Certainly not the American Dream.

To add insult to injury , America is eyeing the UK’s NHS as a potential candidate for their system. The NHS is a money pit , with plenty of opportunities to make people pay. Thankfully we don’t have the gun laws and we don’t have Capital Punishment that would inevitably go hand in hand with more freely available weapons. Killing a police officer in the 1950’s was one of the few offences along with treason that would incur the death penalty in the UK. However, currently in the UK we do not have Capital Punishment.

We do now have assisted dying legislation, however, let’s face it if a hospital wants to send a patient home who isn’t quite ready to go home and is “bed blocking” it’s an inconvenience, just like not paying your insurance subscriptions might be an inconvenience and wouldn’t it be easier and the figures look neater if we could just assist them to a better place. Maybe offer free funerals?

Hippocrates recognised over 2000 years ago the potential for Healthcare abuse, he is responsible for the Hippocratic Oath that all Medical Doctors have historically taken. The American Health Care System modified their version in the US in the 1960’s . Doctors in Pakistan adhere to the original oath apparently. Surely being a Doctor in Pakistan is no different than being a Doctor in the US, UK or the rest of the World for that matter. Why the need to modify it? Were they looking for a short cut in care, to make it cheaper, to make the figures look better.

And this sadly , is where we’ve ended up. We either care of we don’t care . There is no in between.