There have been plenty of examples of people in the US being denied medical treatment because they either have no medical insurance, or the insurance plan they do have does not cover the particular condition that they wish to have treated, or that the faceless bureaucrats and administrators that Sqad hates so much have found a way to weasel out of paying, thus saving their insurance company money.
To offer up such a system as some kind of better alternative to what the NHS currently offers us, despite some shortcomings, does not hold up under analysis.
Nor does the prospect of independent consultants offering any old procedure they feel like,to whomever they feel like, regardless of audits of the elective interventional procedure itself fill me with any confidence in such a proposed system.
And the recommendations made on interventional surgical procedures by NICE - who is it, do you think, who makes those judgements? Its consultant surgeons who specialise in such procedures - not "administrators and bureaucrats.
And contrary to received wisdom - NICE do not make their assessments as to the value of a proposed elective interventional surgical procedure based upon the costs of that procedure. Their guidance is based entirely upon the clinical merit of the procedure in question. The cost calculation and decision to proceed is made by the commissioning NHS Trust, who must weigh up that cost to the Trust along with the evidence from NICE and clinical opinion from their own local experts and the girls treatment team.
http://www.nice.org.uk/nicemedia/live/11220/52084/52084.pdf
Baz is using this story to make the larger point that money can seemingly be found from the public purse, for frippery or for unnecessary help to what some might consider to be unworthy recipients of such largesse, and it is a view held by many. And in the broadest terms, I can understand such frustration, even sympathise - Tighter restrictions on what money can be spent on should be employed across the whole public spending sector. But I do not think this specific case illustrates the point very well.