"Paying Twice"
Those who can afford it sometimes opt for private healthcare, usually to get treated more quickly in private facilities (i.e. facilities not provided by, or using, NHS staff or services). When this occurs, these patients are opting to pay twice for their health care, once for the NHS through taxes, and again for the private care they are using. Critics argue that these people do use NHS services, such as their General Practitioner, screening, and vaccination services, and that their opting out from time-to-time is effectively queue jumping because they are utilising a resource ahead of someone in greater need and that their double payment is the penalty for queue jumping. It is argued that it is a civic responsibility for every citizen capable of paying legally applicable levels of tax, to do so, regardless of service use. Therefore, the public services can be subsidised for those who wish to use them - economically, the more people who pay taxes, the less cost to each individual concerned.
Read more about this topic: Criticism Of The National Health Service
Famous quotes containing the word paying:
“When people who are fighting injure a pregnant woman so that there is a miscarriage, and yet no further harm follows, the one responsible shall be fined what the woman’s husband demands, paying as much as the judges determine.”
—Bible: Hebrew, Exodus 21:22.
“Experience is not a matter of having actually swum the Hellespont, or danced with the dervishes, or slept in a doss- house. It is a matter of sensibility and intuition, of seeing and hearing the significant things, of paying attention at the right moments, of understanding and co-ordinating. Experience is not what happens to a man; it is what a man does with what happens to him.”
—Aldous Huxley (1894–1963)