Why make it expensive to shut the stable door?

Recently I had the misfortune to go to the dentist for a check-up and minor treatment. A few years back, dental treatment in Britain was subsidised by the NHS but it has now effectively become private. That means the costs to me of a check-up, clean-up and a couple of fillings came to over £200. The result now, naturally, is that I am disinclined to return in six months time for the standard check; I shall probably leave it to ten months or a year, and skip the clean-up at the time.

If you ignore the financial effects for the moment, this would seem to be a bad move. The longer I leave it between checks, the more likely that I will pick up some cavity or other problem in the interval. If dental treatment was free, or at least subsidised, I would be more disposed to have regular check-ups and catch the problems before a potential filling can grow into a potential extraction.

The situation is similar, though worse, with optical checks. As I have always worn spectacles, I am used to regular eye checks and know that they are far more useful than just finding out that you might need to wear glasses or need new ones. Optical checks can also find many diseases unrelated to eyesight. And yet a check will cost you around £25 or more.

Why is it that teeth and eye checks are not free, paid for by the NHS (admittedly through our taxes)? I can’t imagine that they are that expensive. All you are paying for is an hour or so of the dentist or optician’s time, not materials or treatment. It shouldn’t be that prohibitive for the Government. Cuba has one of the best health services in the world and a significant reason for that is that they concentrate on catching problems before they get too bad. If I was Prime Minister (perish the thought), one thing I would do is to bring in free dental, eye and general check-ups on a regular basis, maybe encouraging people to have them by making subsequent treatment cheaper. You would catch so many diseases and problems in advance, and save the NHS a great deal of money by nipping them in the bud. And yet recent governments have removed the subsidies on check-ups with the result that potential problems are not caught until they have become major problems with the resultant increased costs to the NHS. It’s madness. It’s so simple a step and yet no politician seems to have thought of it, or they have and they dismissed it. Maybe that’s why politicians are so reviled.