The U.S. healthcare system is imperfect. But one saving grace it does possess is that you get your treatment when you need or want to be getting your treatment. This is not necessarily true of “free” healthcare systems.
Our guide to this story is an Anglo American married couple who decided that England, with its free healthcare, is for them. They know that it is “paid for through taxes,” but free at the point of use was a moral or societal feature they desired.
The problem started when one of the couple, who is a transgender male, needed to stock up on testosterone. This is not something handed out like candy, a visit to a specialist doctor is required. The problem is that it takes, even in normal times, two years to see one of the specialist doctors at the gender identity clinics. This came as a shock.
It shouldn’t have been. Waiting is an integral part of the National Health Service. Even the promise — by no means always kept — is that your treatment will start within 18 weeks, four and a half months, of the initial consultation with the family doctor. That’s not just for gender issues, that’s for everything other than emergencies.
The couple has fled back to the United States, the land of expensive and prompt treatment. One of their comments being, “It’s as if my whole transition is invalid here,” and that’s entirely true. Centralized bureaucracies do not care about the individual nor the individual experience, which is why we can observe decreasing levels of awfulness within the U.S. healthcare system.
It was PJ O’Rourke who pointed out that if you think healthcare is expensive now, just wait until it’s free. Observation of the world around us — that British lived experience — would seem to be that it’ll get worse as well. Why make the U.S. system equally as bad?
