“Rationing” is a word justifiably wreathed with alarm in the United States. With the looming prospect of Obamacare, horror stories are pouring in from Britain and Canada about nationalized medicine: The callous administrators, the long waiting lists for routine treatments, the scandalously high death rates for ailments that are, within our borders, swiftly cured.
But rationing isn’t always as extreme as it sounds, as I discovered 12 years ago when I lived in London. I had just climbed out of a black cab and entered the hospital where I was about to have our second child.
I was experiencing the fierce urgency of now, and if you’ve ever had a baby you will know exactly how urgent and fierce “now” can be.
Very quickly, I was ushered into a grim little room with a gurney. The great thing about hospitals under nationalized systems like Britain’s National Health Service is that you don’t go through an absurd amount of paperwork before gaining entrance.
The lousy thing is that no one working at the hospital even remotely shares your sense of urgency, or feels the need to pretend he does. This is an unappreciated aspect of the rationing that invariably results from single-payer systems: Those who are fragrantly termed “caregivers” needn’t lavish sympathy on patients who can’t go anywhere else.
In my grim little room, I seemed to have been forgotten by the authorities. When a nurse finally arrived, her attitude was decidedly brisk.
“You look ready to go,” she observed. “Right, do you have your paper supplies?”
“My what?”
The nurse was annoyed. She explained that I was supposed to have brought a supply of towels and cotton wadding. Did I not know this?
I did not, I apologized, eager to appease a powerful individual who might bring me to a bed. I explained that I was used to American hospitals, which, so far as I could recall, provided paper products to their customers. I hoped it would not be too much trouble that I had failed to provide the materials needed by the National Health Service.
Privately I was shocked, though I did not say so. Having traveled in the impoverished Third World, I was used to bringing syringes and other medical supplies with me in case they weren’t available. But here, in Britain?
The nurse, only faintly exasperated, led me to another, much nicer small room. I told her I didn’t want an epidural, which she said was just as well since there was very little chance of getting one. Paper products were clearly not the only comforts in short supply.
What followed was medically uneventful. The infant arrived, and was weighed and measured. Now, obviously, it was time for us to be wheeled to a maternity ward to recuperate for a couple of days.
But hospital personnel kept popping in to say that they were having trouble “getting a bed” for us. The room we occupied was needed by the next customer, yet there was no spot in the maternity ward for us to take.
So it was that six hours after arriving at the hospital, I was in a taxi again heading home. This time I held a newborn in my arms.
I had just tasted the health care rationing that Britons live with as a matter of course. It wasn’t a ghastly experience, but it also wasn’t something that Americans, accustomed as we are to comfort and plenty, would regard as acceptable.
Examiner Columnist Meghan Cox Gurdon is a former foreign correspondent and a regular contributor to the books pages of the Wall Street Journal. Her Examiner column appears on Thursday.
