From Dr. Scott Atlas, Wall Street Journal: Even as the single-payer system remains the ideal for many on the left, its worth examining how Britains NHS, established in 1948, is faring. The answer: badly. NHS England—a government body that receives about £100 billion a year from the Department of Health to run Englands health-care system—reported this month that its hospital waiting lists soared to their highest point since 2006, with 3.2 million patients waiting for treatment after diagnosis. NHS England figures for July 2013 show that 508,555 people in London alone were waiting for operations or other treatments—the highest total for at least five years. Even cancer patients have to wait: According to a June report by NHS England, more than 15% of patients referred by their general practitioner for urgent treatment after being diagnosed with suspected cancer waited more than 62 days—two full months—to begin their first definitive treatment. Britons who can afford to avoid the NHS are eager to do so. About six million British citizens buy private health insurance and about 250,000 choose to pay for private treatment out-of-pocket each year—though NHS insurance costs $3,500 annually for every British man, woman and child. The socialized-medicine model is struggling elsewhere in Europe as well. Americans diagnosed with heart disease receive treatment with medications significantly more frequently than patients in Western Europe, according to Kenneth Thorpe in Health Affairs in 2007. Lancet Oncology in that same year published data demonstrating that American cancer patients have survival rates for all major cancers better than those in Western Europe and far better than in the U.K. Even in Sweden, often heralded as the paradigm of a successful welfare state, months-long wait times for treatment routinely available in the U.S. have been widely documented. The recent Veterans Affairs scandal, following the disastrous ObamaCare rollout, was a red flag about problems of nationalized health. Now concrete evidence is coming in from other countries that have tried it for decades. The reality is that the key goals for health-care reform—reducing spending, expanding access to affordable coverage, preserving personal choice and portability of coverage, promoting competition in insurance markets, and maintaining excellence in medicine—do not require government to directly provide insurance or health care. https://youtube/watch?v=1m-fhYPLX6A
Posted on: Mon, 18 Aug 2014 20:37:59 +0000
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