Originally Posted by
robertlouis
Jericho is messing with you - just one of his many skills. Consider this though. Both he and I live in a country that has had what you choose to call "socialised" medicine for over 60 years. It provides healthcare free at the point of demand in return for a contribution to the general tax burden and through the "job tax" of national insurance. Every other developed economy except the USA plays comparable variations on the same healthcare tune. And the NHS, despite its faults, is the most universally loved institution in the UK, up there with the BBC, both founded on the principle of providing excellent publicly-funded service.
Your fear that "the government" will make decisions about the quality and timing of care is essentially groundless. Here, all key decisions are made by clinicians and locally by general practitioners. The "government", other than setting the overall budget, plays no part in that. If you study the general response to the current Tory - right-wing - government's proposals to make fundamental changes to healthcare organisation and spending by essentially privatising key aspects of the system, you'll discover suspicion, fear and loss, and the recognition that they are attempting to dismantle what has come to be embraced as one of the most admirable things about being British.
The NHS is far from perfect, but rather that than the US version of social Darwinism red in tooth and claw. Is the principle of rugged individualism worth defending when it allows the poor to suffer and die? I hope that your answer to that question will be no.
Oh, and SRS is available on the NHS. Women seeking the surgery have to go through rigorous and searching (sometimes brutally so) processes before they can move to the final procedure. I know - several ts friends of mine have gone through it, so any suggestion that the NHS is knowingly underwriting "cosmetic" surgery in such cases is simply untrue.
Add the fact that the procedure is carried out under the cleanest and most stringent of conditions by the best expert surgeons that the NHS can provide and a girl has little to fear, unlike in the US where the prohibitive costs of self-funding often drive them abroad to places where standards are less scrupulous, to say the least, and the results, as already pointed out in this thread, are unsatisfactory or worse.