Obamacare, UK Version

From the Telegraph:

In a letter to The Daily Telegraph, the presidents of the Royal College of Surgeons, the College of Emergency Medicine and other leading medical associations call on ministers to redress the balance to ensure that such patients receive “the highest levels of supportive care”.

They argue that while the NHS has succeeded in reducing waiting times for pre-planned operations in recent years, this has come “at the cost of relative neglect of the needs of the patients admitted as emergencies”.

Often, those in greatest need are having their surgery “squeezed in at the end of the day”, they say. “Surgeons know the service could be much better,” they write. Cutting waiting times became a priority for the NHS after Labour came to power in 1997 with a pledge to take 100,000 patients off the waiting lists.