PrintMay 20, 2010
Socialized Medicine Gives Birth to 'Ash Cash'
Now that ObamaCare has been signed into law our healthcare industry can start catching up with the superior National Health Service in the United Kingdom. The bureaucrat laden NHS has been plagued with a chronic shortage of doctors, due in large part to the poor level of compensation and the maddening labyrinth of government paperwork. A growing number of NHS physicians have discovered a somewhat ghoulish means of boosting their income which is commonly referred to as “ash cash.”
The UK Daily Mail reports that.
Under current rules, a patient who has died cannot be cremated until two doctors - normally their GP and one other - check their medical history.
The doctors sign off the cause of death and check the deceased did not have a pacemaker, which could explode if placed in a furnace, before the body is officially released.
Despite the ten-minute task often being completed within their working hours, each doctor pockets £73.50 because the paperwork - unlike death certificates - is not considered part of their NHS duties.
The combined £147 cost of the paperwork is usually charged to the funeral director, who passes it on to the family as part of their overall bill, though it often goes unnoticed.
Figures released this year show that doctors in England received £14.7million for filling out cremation forms in 2009.
The popular and lucrative “ash cash” program has created a bizarre competition among some physicians. Robin Francis, a junior doctor in the NHS wrote that.
‘If a terminal patient is known to several doctors, we also hope they survive just until we're on call and then we'll be the one called to confirm, see the body after death and head down to patient affairs before anyone else beats us to that cheque.'
This is what can happen in a government run, bureaucrat administered healthcare system where treatment is rationed and patient needs are based upon mathematical formulas and computer models. This is the sort of callous and dehumanizing system that Mr. Obama and his comrades in the party have helped launch. Unlike Obama’s fabricated stories of needless amputations and monstrous insurance company plots that are designed to rake in profits at the expense of their patients, the “ash cash” story is real.
