this post was submitted on 13 Jan 2025
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United States | News & Politics
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Almost none of which include dental care.
They're called luxury bones for a reason..
Wait hold on really? I saw NHS covers dental and eye exams. Do the countries with universal healthcare that do not cover dental, also not cover eye exams?
Maybe in the distant past, but definitely not anymore. The rules in other countries in the UK differ, but from a quick look in England eye tests are free only for under 16 (or 18 and in education) or over 60, people on income related benefits, and or have certain conditions or predisposition to them.
Dental is charged in tiers, from £26.80 for simple work to £319.10 for more complex work, however these reset every 2 months, so if you have to go back to complete complex work after longer (which is likely due to lack of availability) you gave to pay again. Kids, pregnant and postnatal people, and or those on income related benefits get treated for free. However there are hardly any NHS dentists left, they've almost all gone private, where they charge much more, and while private clinics are required to provide NHS services, the wait times and availability as I already mentioned, are terrible.
TIL. Sounds pretty close to the American Medicaid system (which is health, dental, and vision) tbh. It's free if you're low income, pregnant, and it's not as hard to get for children, but the number of times I heard "we don't have any openings for Medicaid patients" was... Too high.
The sad truth is that the NHS has slowly and steadily been defunded in to uselessness, to justify and enable large chunks of it to be sold off to (mostly) American insurers under the guise of "increasing efficiency" or whatever, in the very deliberate process of tuning our system in to one more like yours.
This means private insurance has become a flourishing business here, but all that does is syphon trained professionals, facilities, and resources from the NHS, and hands them over to those who can pay to skip the queue, and the profits to a bunch of already rich bastards, resulting in staff and bed shortages which lead to months and even years long waiting lists for not only simply seeing a doctor, but also getting treatment, even for time sensitive conditions like cancer.
The same thing is happening in Canada and other places where there is socialised healthcare, because making money is more important to our capitalist, and at best neoliberal, governments and those who fund them, than our lives are.