Here it is guys; the good news I thought I would never live to see:

http://www.library.nhs.uk/screening/ViewResource.aspx?resID=60457&tabID=288&catID=5529

Yes, you have to rub your eyes and read it over and over to grasp the significance. This is the very first national health screening programme ever introduced in the UK that is actually aimed exclusively at - wait for it - MEN. That's not a misprint; I did say men, not women. The members of the inferior, unimportant, second sex. Getting their own screening programme. I think I will have to go and lie down for an hour or two.

I'm back, and it wasn't a dream. It's genuine. I have been trying to find the catch, the get-out, but there seems to be none. Shock, horror: women are simply not included in the programme. Apparently the victims of AAA are overwhelmingly men aged 65 or over, and that is why 65-year-old men are being targeted. Please forgive me for using the words "men" and "victims" in the same sentence, I know that is never supposed to happen.

The only negative things I can find to say are that they could have chosen a programme aimed at bigger killers of men, such as prostate cancer; and AAA is most probably chosen because it's a cheap option, and they can't allow too much money to be shunted away from the valuable sex; but hey, let's not be churlish.

Note that AAA kills 6,500 men a year in the UK:

http://www.menshealthforum.org.uk/userpage1.cfm?item_id=2697

- and there has never been any programme to screen for it until now. Bear that in mind as you read on.

For the record: in the UK women have had a national cervical cancer screening programme in operation since 1964. That's right: a whole 45 years before men have got anything at all:

http://info.cancerresearchuk.org/cancerstats/types/cervix/screening/briefhistory/

The latest stats from the same source (Cancer Research UK) tell us that cervical cancer caused 949 deaths in the UK in 2006:

http://info.cancerresearchuk.org/cancerstats/types/cervix/

UK women have also had a national breast cancer screening programme since 1988; that's over 20 years ago:

http://info.cancerresearchuk.org/cancerstats/types/breast/screening/history/

and breast cancer killed 12,319 women in 2006, the latest year available.

Am I the only one who suspects the feminists will still, despite this being the first screening available solely to men, get all up in arms over things? I'm sure one of us will find out soon enough.........

I was thinking that too. Only men who are 65 (and older I would guess)?

How many won't even live to be 65?

Also, like TERA said, here a man 65 or older can get medicaid so this is useless.

I thought you had universal health care across the pond?

TERA, I am in America, the folks across the pond were the Brits who I thought had universal health care.

Tera must correct you there - not just England that has universal care, but the United Kingdon. these are not the same.

Uk covers England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.

In fact people in Scotalnd and Wales get even better health care than in England as the governemtn spends much more money in those regions, so they don't even pay for drugs for example.

Rather unfair on us in England though.


Back on the topic of AAA- I looked at the stats and apparently it kills twice as men men per year than cervical cancer!! - Yet that gets the screen program years and years before!

I was born into the NHS. I have not lived in any circumstance where free, universal health care has not been available. By 'free' of course, I mean a system of health provision paid for from Tax revenue of one sort or another. In Britain it was the National Insurance Scheme. In Oz it is Medicare.

I am by no means a 'socialist'. Socialism is an anathema to me. Nevertheless, despite the 'All-Party' initiation and design of the British NHS it seems now to be considered a 'socialist' effort.

It is and was NOT.

It has become so, though.

The deficiencies of the British model-in-practice that causes so much fearfulness in American Conservatives is predominantly due to Bureaucracy, and that is largely 'socialist' or 'managerial' in nature. Often both.

When I was a boy my Family Doctor, Dr MacDonald (I still remember him) knew every patient, every child, every damned bit of our medical history. He was a dedicated man well supported by a dedicated system. He made home visits and maintained a working and busy surgery. He conducted minor surgery in situ. He had a modest 'Panel' of patients allocated to him for which he was paid a modest but well above average salary based on the number of his patients and NOT the number of services he provided. His professionalism and maintenance of professional knowledge and standards that determined his range of provision. He was respected and admired.

Managerialism and socialism are not the only enemies of proper universal health care provision. Most western countries have a 'mixed' model (the NHS exists in a mixed millieux, just as the Australian one does) but the 'controlling' and 'obstructive' element is the Medical Profession itself. In the USA it is a Medical Mafia of horrendous size and impact.

The level of disagreement apparant in American Politics over this matter appears to me to be totally ridiculous. There is absolutely no reason why The NHS or an American version could not be run efficiently and effectively. But there are people who DO NOT WANT IT TO.

America really ought to bite the bullet and have a Universal Health System, to my mind, and not be afraid of it. But that is America's business, not mine.

If hopes were dupes, fears may be liars.

here is an example of the sheer friggin' managerial lunacy that rips through the system. Just think of the hours or days of 'Committee' deliberations that produced this total fiasco.

While working at a mail processing centre, I came across a piece of mail addressed to 'Wales, England'.

I make a point of telling this tale to anyone Welsh who criticises England.

You have certainly done some homework on the UK’s National Health Service (NHS) TERA; very impressive. But as a fully paid-up member of the army of UK taxpayers who are obliged to watch our hard-earned money being wasted by the bucket load in front of our very eyes, let me give you the summary that you will not read in any official documentation or government website.

The service is available to everyone, and is usually described as “free”. But this is just a deceptive euphemism for the taxpayer having to pay through the nose for it. It is only “free” at the point of delivery, i.e. you don’t actually pay at the time you visit a GP, clinic or hospital. However you do pay through your taxes, regardless of whether you use the service all the time, when you need it, or never. Thus it is a demand-driven service, which creates one of its great weaknesses – that it is open to abuse by malingerers, time-wasters and lonely women who relish the open-door free access to attention from their handsome local doctor. The greatest users by far are the greatest demanders by far, aka women. Hence the complaint regularly voiced and occasionally heard, that it should be renamed the “National Women’s Health Service”.

The NHS is a huge and staggeringly expensive institution in the UK, burning its way through a sum approaching £100 billion every year. Yet it is always complaining that it is chronically underfunded. In other words, like all large government-funded organisms, it is endlessly hungry for your money. It has many severe faults, largely stemming from the fact that it is a political football used by whichever party is in power.

The stated objective is to take care of the nation’s health. But only the stupid or naïve believe that is all it exists for. I can add a number of other objectives grafted onto the NHS by politicians:

1) A means of soaking up unemployment. The NHS is not just the single biggest employer in the UK; it is actually one of the single biggest employers in the world. Look here:

http://www.nhs.uk/aboutnhs/Pages/About.aspx

Huge numbers of these people have no medical qualifications at all and are just bureaucrats, pen-pushers and bean-counters. External consultants are also engaged at the cost of more millions to report on how much money is being wasted. Go figure.

2) A means of spending taxpayers’ money. In the UK, the government firmly believes that it is much better at spending your money than you are. That is why our taxes are astronomically high, and why we have so many ministries, government departments, committees and quangos, all demanding billions out of our taxes. The NHS is the biggest of these money-guzzling monsters and a brilliant excuse for parting hard-working people from their cash.

3) A propaganda machine for the government of the day. What better way of promoting what a superb government you are, than by demonstrating that you are treating, curing and looking after the health of more people than the other lot have ever done? Hence the compilation of endless statistics that are manipulated to prove how wonderful the whole system is. The current fad in the NHS is the reduction of waiting lists for operations. The government demands waiting lists are reduced, and that nobody must wait longer than a stipulated period, so that they can stand up before the electorate and boast about how good they are. Hence there is intense political pressure on the NHS to meet government targets rather than clinical needs. Patients cease to be people and become numbers and stats. “Waiting lists” have been re-defined to ensure the targets are met, regardless of reality.

4) An organ of the Big Brother/Big Nanny mentality that pervades government thinking. The NHS can be used to promote all sorts of social engineering experiments and “issues”. It is forever nagging us to do this or stop doing that.

As I say, don’t expect to read any of this on any official site. But believe me, it is nearer the truth than any propaganda you will read there.

When I was born here in 1970, everything was free.
Education was free, medical treatment was free, if you had an accident anywhere you were paid a decent amount of money until you recovered enough to return to work.

When my younger brother was born I remember the Plunket nurse (in no way like a social worker) would come around once every two weeks and see that Mum and all the kids were doing OK and advise her on how to do this or that (these were often older women that were retired nurses and had grown up kids themselves).

We really dropped the ball here when that idea was thrown out, now we have 20 year old "social workers" that are still wet behind the ears and have one thing in mind "feminist ideals", I bet a lot of the older Plunket nurses are spinning in their graves now, they would never have allowed a shambles that is the current system to have happened in their day, they were always of the opinion that a family was not a family without the father.

Sorry if I've swayed this thread way off topic.

I have to agree TERA, a thing like this was suggested after the last election here, but, as you say, it makes it a bit of a paper tiger if men have to pay (and they usually do) for the treatment to fix things found during scans and what have you.

My biggest gripe is, the age is far too high, over here women get free cervical smear tests and mammograms from the age of 40 (might be lower), they even have a mobile bus like thing that travels around the country side doing these tests, it cost NZ$5million (I should know, I helped wire the bloody thing at the bus factory here).

Mind you, wait for the feminists to start saying things like "Oh them men won't turn up, they won't even go to the doctor!" or (more likely) "How many women will be dis-advantaged and eventually die from this frivolous idea by the government, they are turning their back on womens health!"