19 year-old Ameilia Ellerby is dead.

Despite having sought care from Great Britain’s system of socialized medicine, the National Health Service (NHS), Ms. Ellerby nonetheless exited life, an unnecessary outcome, but one wholly inevitable.

According to reporting in the Daily Mail, Ms. Ellerby sought treatment from her Primary Care Physician more than a year ago, when the lump on her back was the size of a pea. After an online consultation (due to COVID overreaction) she was told it was “likely just a cyst” but she would be scheduled for a scan to make certain.

However, in a government-run system, perpetually cash-strapped, the wait time would be roughly six months.

The lump however, grew dramatically. Six weeks after her online consultation she again asked for an in person appointment and assessment only to be told she had to wait for her scan. Not entirely disinterested, the doctor’s office prescribed an antibiotic for an as yet unknown reason. Of course, it had no effect.

The lump grew and along with it, her pain. Finally, in February of this year she could no longer take the pain and called for emergency services. Paramedics responded, but under the rules of the NHS, Ms. Ellerby was deemed to be under a doctor’s care, so they declined to offer any assistance.

Another six weeks passed until Amelia again sought an appointment via the NHS online portal. Through sheer luck she encountered a physician who took the time to look at the circumstances rather than simply insisting “you’ve been scheduled for a scan, you must be patient.”

Realizing the danger, the doctor called her in right away. According to her Aunt, Claire Hanshaw, with whom Amelia lived, “When she did eventually get seen by a doctor he got her in two days later for an X-ray. A week and half later she had an MRI scan because the doctor was concerned and thought it might be cancer.”

It is instructive to note the time frames involved. It took two days for a desperately ill Amelia to receive an X-ray, a test routinely performed on the spot at nearly any doctor’s office in the United States. Moreover, after seeing the troubling results from the X-ray, an MRI was scheduled for a “week and a half” later, making it a combined two weeks of waiting on top of the full year of delays Amelia had already suffered.

Amelia had the MRI scan towards the end of March. While she was still waiting for the results two weeks later she was in so much pain she went to the Emergency Room in her home city of York.

They did a CT scan there, and she was admitted to the hospital in an attempt to get control over her unbearable pain. The results of that scan revealed cancer in her lungs, lymph nodes, and groin, as well as in her back. Additional scans were scheduled, and nearly two months later, in May, when the interminable waiting time for results had finally passed she received the news she had perhaps two months to live.

Less than a month later, on June 12th, Amelia Ellerby left this life.

The wrongs revealed in this story are numerous and multilayered. The endemic limitations of a bureaucratic model of medicine and a tick-box mentality of care combined to deny Amelia Ellerby the care her government-run health system declares to be a human right.

The space of time between the ordering of a scan and its performance is unconscionably long, permitting aggressive ailments like Amelia’s cancer to metastasize unimpeded. Those already unacceptable delays are only compounded by the equally indefensible wait for results. What takes days, sometimes only hours in the United States, takes weeks, months, and in the case of Amelia Ellerby, more than a year to accomplish under the National Health Service.

Great Britain isn’t alone in their failing. These tragic stories are commonplace in all countries with a socialized medicine structure.

When time is of the essence, delay is deadly, and when it comes to socialized medicine, delay is the order of the day. Funny how the end result eases the financial burden on the system. Surely that cannot be by design?