Hey! Cripes!
What do you MEAN Im not going to die? | Oddly Enough | Reuters — My advice: when you are told you are going to die. Get a second opinion.
A British man who went on a wild spending spree after doctors said he only had a short time to live wants compensation because the diagnosis was wrong and he is now healthy — but broke.
John Brandrick, 62, was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer two years ago and told that he would probably die within a year.
He quit his job, sold or gave away nearly all his possessions, stopped paying his mortgage and spent his savings dining out and going on holiday.
Brandrick was left with little more than the black suit, white shirt and red tie that he had planned to be buried in when it emerged a year later that his suspected “tumor” was no more than a non-life threatening inflammation of the pancreas.
found By Bubba Martin
Sucks to be him I guess!
The National Health Service should reimburse him and give a large amount of monetary compensation, I say this as a UK tax payer.
It’s a shame he didn’t die 🙂
#2, Yikes!
The amount of money involved is probably a couple hundred thousand pounds.
The fair thing seems to be, re-imburse him his spending spree and set him up for a meager (for not getting a 2nd opinion) retirement. It’s a better use of state funds then IRAQ.
can you even get a second opinion with the NHS?
#4 – Wow Joshua… You are smooooooth… 🙂
You managed to get in the good ole conservative knee jerk jab at Universal Health Care without using any of the GOP lapdog language usually ascribed to the “Just Walk It Off” ideology…
I could learn from you… 🙂
Reimburse him? Are you people crazy? Is the goal to die in debt and make everyone else pay for it? Pathetic.
How about some responsibility? I think he should sit in a low end nursing home and crap in his pants during the last few years of his life.
Why is it ok to try to play the system and get free shit at someone else’s expense?
Could be worse.. What if he went and killed everyone he didn’t like, knowing that he had nothing lose if he himself were caught or killed?
#6 – Why is it ok to try to play the system and get free shit at someone else’s expense?
Comment by julieb — 5/8/2007 @ 8:45 am
Why isn’t it?
#5…OFTLO…….sorry….I’m laughing so hard I don’t know if I can answer you. 🙂
I lived in the UK for quite awhile, and believe me, the issue of second opinions is a joke. If this guy went through the normal procedure, he waited 6 months or possibly more to see the first Doctor, then when tests showed he had(or didn’t have) cancer, he most likely waited 4 weeks to see the Doctor a second time(assuming the Doctor even ordered the tests on the first visit) and to be told he had the cancer. At that point he would have been told he had a year or less to live and his next visit to the Doctor would have been schedualed for 14 months away. 🙂
I may be conservative, but I believe that it is cheaper to allow people to have access to proper health care than to wait until they need expensive life saving intervention. But, having said that, my problem with universal health care is that a lack of compition means higher prices for visits, procedures and medications.
Maybe you should spend some time googling the British goverments sites concerning the NHS and see all of the billions and billions of POUNDS spent by the present Labour goverment over the last 10 years and the results have been a failed computor system(around 34 billion pounds), closing of local hospitals, a reduction in services offered, no dental service at all anymore, Doctors and Nurses fleeing to other countries because the NHS has the lowest pay of any modern nation for them, but has Administrators making 200 thousand pounds a year, plus bonuses. After spending hundreds of billions of pounds the only thing they have done is reduced the waiting time to be seen(otherwise this man would not have been seen until AFTER he was supposed to die).
Why is he so sure the second diagnosis is correct? I would keep the first one and after two years go declare myself dead and start over.
He’s told he’s going to die, decides to say “screw you” to his mortgage lender and just stops paying to go on holiday. Wow, where has my sympathy gone?
#10 – I don’t disagree with your assessment of the problems with socialized medicine in England… But the American system isn’t better if you are not in the “have” as opposed to the “have not” category.
I’m not gonna look it up, but the numbers of uninsured in the US is often touted around 30 to 45 million (in that range), mostly poor, many many children… What gets talked about less is the underinsured, who have company based health care plans that simply offer such poor coverage that people still end up making choices between using medical benefits (that they do pay into) and buying food or paying bills. These choices only get harder when kids are involved.
My health care plan isn’t the worst I’ve ever heard of, but it is the worst I have ever had – and the most expensive. In a given month, at least 25% of monthly take home income is consumed by health care costs my insurance won’t cover… and I am better off than many.
You free market guys point out the failures of existing socialized systems, and sometimes you exagerate and sometimes you have valid points. But a critical analysis of our market driven private health care industry reveals that it isn’t exactly a roaring success either.
The English system covers everyone, but is slow and inefficient.
The US system is fast and responsive, but leaves large numbers out in the cold.
What can these systems learn from each other? What can these systems learn from systems outside these two?
Something needs to change.
#14 – Fact of the matter is that everyone in the US is covered … in an emergency. The people with no health insurance go untreated until it becomes acute, then get treated in emergency rooms. They can’t pay, so the costs are shifted to the insured patients.
I understand what you are driving it, but its disingenuine to call that coverage. Allowing a system to exist that perpetuates small health problems until they become life threatening isn’t any kind of coverage at all, and it morally reprehensible.
But to say you get treatment when it becomes an emergency isn’t true. You don’t “get” treatment… You still buy it, because you aren’t covered. And the cost is outrageous. And you can’t afford even a fraction of it. And you file for bankruptcy. And you are ruined while someone else entirely gets the cost shifted to them. It’s a lose lose for everyone… Including the hospital.
with HMOs you can have socialized medicine responsiveness and capitalist prices!
I was gonna debate that until I read it and I realized you were saying the opposite of what I thought you said at first. 🙂 Further, with HMOs you end up with accountants making medical decisions in place of doctors based on costs analysis. To me, that’s unacceptable, and effectively reduced the doctors role in the hospital to that of a sales clerk in a Best Buy.
——
But I just can’t buy into your “let the market lead the way” philosophy.
Capitalism is just another kind of corruption that favors priviledge, nepotism, and graft, and rewards greed, deviousness, and at its worst , cruelty. I’m not saying that’s always a bad thing… 🙂
If I want a car, market forces and my income will determine whether or not I can buy an SUV or a Toyota Corrola. (Now, I’ll take the Corrola in any case, but that’s just me) If I can afford the base price, the gas, the insurance, and everything else, I could drive off in an SUV… If I can’t then my choice is made.
That’s fine. We all have different incomes and no law or standard of ethics can realistically dictate that we all are entitled to the car of our choice… Or house, or clothing labels, or what have you…
But health care is different, and if you happen to have a health problem, you become accutely aware that the choice between Corrola and an SUV isn’t a matter of preference or desire, but rather its all about whether your life is managable or miserable and in some cases it might be the choice between living and dying…
And I’ll be goddamned if I’m gonna let the same market that pushes fast food, designer furs, Disneyland, sports cars, and pro sporting events on pay per view… dictate health care. It isn’t qualified.
And in the richest nation on Earth, where business tycoons bitch about having to pay taxes while sipping cognac from the deck of their private yatchs, health care should be treated as a fundamental right. It’s the ethical stand to take. It’s the right stand to take.
The problem is, how to design a system that works best… and instead of getting mired down in rhetoric about how it won’t work, it would be more productive to roll up our sleeves and solve the problem.
#15. yes, not only isn’t there a free market in health care (without, among other things, abandoning licensing of doctors and abolishing the testing of drugs) but there simply simply can’t be.
A buyer of health care can’t simply decide he doesn’t want any, and can’t really say whether he needs any. All the knowledge is in the hands of the seller. Not like patients can consult Consumer Reports before their heart surgery and shop around for the best prices.
I think we are in agreement, actually.