Marathon Pundit: British ObamaCare update: Basic surgeries being withheld to save money

It's been three months since I've done a British ObamaCare post--but with all of our problems here, including $3.00-a-gallon gasoline, threats of cap and trade schemes, and greedy public-sector unions--I just haven't had the time to keep an eye on the United Kingdom and its National Health Service:

The below comes from the Guardian, one of Britain's most liberal newspapers:

Basic surgical procedures that could improve the lives of thousands of people are being withheld by NHS trusts desperate to save money, according to some of the country's leading doctors.

In a letter in today's Guardian, the presidents of associations representing six of the biggest surgical disciplines claim "patients attend their GP surgeries with conditions that can be effectively treated by surgery and are being turned away".

Some of the patients may not even be told that an operation could help their problem, the surgeons say. Even when the sick are referred to a hospital consultant they can be refused operations because trusts have "arbitrarily defined a number of operations that reduce pain, improve quality of life and prevent serious long-term complications as being of 'limited clinical value.'"

Individual health trusts are allowed to make decisions about the provision of treatments to reflect the needs of the local population, but surgeons say medical procedures ranging from those aimed at tackling back pain and common hernias to bone-anchored hearing aids and varicose vein removal are being simultaneously scrapped across the NHS.