BrAiN said:

I keep talking to people from the UK and they keep telling me it isn't quite as black and white as it seems to us Americans.

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Quote:

In Holland my taxes were about 10% higher.

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zappaisgod said:

Of course you prefer their tax system. You were the beneficiary of it and not the payer. Of course, I'm quite sure your tax rates would have risen as your income increased but you left after you got your titty so you totally fucked them. Let's see illegal alien comes, gets free ed, health care, and legal advice and then ......splits. "So long and thanks for all the fish". If you were the least bit honorable you would go back. Since it's so great there, why ARE you here?

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Andy21 said:

I live in the UK, I have lived in the US also for a year. The tax I pay is pretty high. I earn $3060 a month and the tax I paid this month was $434.96. I want to present you with a realistic picture of how our NHS currently functions. I will use the case of Tony Wilson who died a month or so ago to illustrate my feelings. He founded the succesful music label Factory Records and was a well known journalist in the Manchester area. After developing renal cancer a while back, Wilson's doctors recommended he take the drug Sunitinib (aka Sutent), the £3,500 per month cost of which was not funded by the Manchester Primary Care Trust. He was turned down by the NHS, while patients being treated alongside him at the Christie Hospital and living just a few miles away in Cheshire received funding for the therapy. A number of Wilson's music industry friends, including the Happy Mondays former manager Nathan McGough and their current manager, Elliot Rashman, formed a fund to help pay for Wilson's medical treatment. The sickening part is that a friend of mine who suffered self esteem issues was given breast implants free of charge by our local Primary Care Trust recently, yet this potentially life saving treatment was denied someone because they lived in a specific area in order to balance the books of the local Primary Care Trust. Large areas of the NHS have been infected by the numbers game mentality so prevalent in many of our bureaucratic systems (see police, education etc), whereby staff are given targets to achieve certain goals regardless of whether the achievement of those goals is in the patient's long term best interest. Targets are then quoted as statistics by politicians to prove what a great job they are doing. My grandmother for example will soon be sent home from hospital after a heart attack despite the fact that her care has not included sufficient physical therapy in order to strengthen her muscles to get her walking again (muscles which have atrophied due to lying in a hospital bed). My frail grandfather will be expected to care for her. She is being sent home to meet bed clearance targets. Having said all that I am comforted that I and others can get medical care, free at the point of need regardless of what position we are in financially. I take the view that to base someones right to survive on their ability to earn and pay for treatment is both inhuman and immoral. I would rather see institutional changes in our current system than it's destruction.

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