In Britain, Forget About the Social Safety Net

The big idea of the welfare state is its safety net. In the old days, we all know, people lived in fear of sickness, knowing that a single visit to the hospital could wipe them out.

Thank goodness that is over. In compassionate Britain for instance, with “free at the point of service” national health care you can never lose your house from paying your medical bills.

Or can you?

According to James Bartholomew, author of The Welfare State We’re In, you can lose your house and everything.

In Britain, the National Health Service will indeed pay for all your medical costs. But if you end up disabled, or needing long-term care, they will kick you out of hospital, by reclassifying you. They will say that you don’t need “medical” care but “social” care. So there.

And when you are in social care, in a private nursing home, they can come for your house.

Bartholomew tells of horror stories televised on Britain’s Panorama program. Lots of people thought they would get their cradle-to-grave protection from the NHS.

But then they had got severe Alzheimer's Disease or had endured disabling strokes or had been knocked down by a car and become totally paralysed. They were treated, for a while, as patients in NHS beds - for free. But then they were shunted out into private nursing homes and told that they would have to sell their homes and pay for their care.

The TV program showed a clip of

a fresh-faced Tony Blair boldly declaring in 1997 that he did not want a Britain in which old people needing care had to sell their homes. Well, that is precisely what, after nine years of his rule, we have got. It was all blather and lies.

So in reality, Britain is just as mean and Wild West a country as the United States, where you have to spend down your assets before you can have your nursing home care paid by Medicaid.