I've been reading a lot around the sphere about the American comments on our NHS and some on the left here have been pointing out the ludicrousness of those comments, a point well taken.
However, when the left then concludes from those ill-informed comments that in fact, the NHS is fine, I have to go to bloggers I know and trust, not necessarily left wing but including the left and see what they say. You see, as I don't get sick, I don't know much about the NHS and can only go on what others say.
Wat Tyler, of the Taxpayers Alliance, says :
"Just how is it that a doubling in NHS spending has resulted in crisis ward closures, cancelled ops, and rationed drugs? The answer is a case study in the appalling wastefulness of Big Government."
Dr. Grumble is a self-confessed left wing doctor who works in an NHS hospital:
"The BMA has finally woken up to what is happening to our health service. Sadly it is too late. Powerful forces have lined up to nobble the political parties. Market forces and privatisation of NHS services are the future. There is no stopping it. The public do not want this but many out there are convinced that this will make the NHS more responsive and efficient. The ways of the Soviets have been seen to fail. The Soviet Union has been dismantled. Now it's time for the NHS to go the same way."
Calum Carr is a left wing blogger who states:
"Once I was naive. I believed that, I knew that, regardless of how strapped for cash was the NHS the one thing upon which we could rely was to be treated with compassion and caring. Very soon after I started accompanying Mrs Carr to medical appointments I was disabused of my silly and naive ideas.
Caring? Compassion?
They couldn't even do courtesy and respect and these two properties come before caring and compassion. Unless a patient is treated with respect and courtesy, forget anything better. We had to forget anything better."
So I wonder what to think of the NHS.
# Interesting post on the NHS and the Tories here.
# Nice one, courtesy Dearieme.
"It's the envy of the world": but no-one copied it.
ReplyDeleteI met a woman at dinner a few years ago who was most emphatic - she'd had to use four health services: ours, the Canadian, the French and the Icelandic. Best - Icelandic. Worst (by quite a margin) - ours.
So honest and accurate are our Government's statistics that I'm usually inclined to pay more heed to experience - even second hand - than the Official Fiction.
The estimable Ms McCargle gives a quick, sharp picture of the continental health services here.
ReplyDeletehttp://meganmcardle.theatlantic.com/
From all I've read so far, our system is %$#&*ed.
ReplyDeleteEver becoming seriously ill and needing to rely on the NHS is enough to give me night sweats.For real.
ReplyDeleteThe mere fact that they can misdiagnose a head injury ,then kick out a patient who had been beaten becuase he becomes unruly[ a symptom of head injury], call the police when he tries to re-enter for treatment andthe patient ends up dead in a police station speaks volumes about the NHS[and police] in this country.
Sadly they have spent more money and wasted it on monitoring and targets rather than more doctors, nurses, services etc...
ReplyDeleteI makes blood boil to think what should have happened with all that money (our money)!
I have a number of school friends who went on to become eminent surgeons and I dated a girl for some years who's mother ran a modest [GP] surgery in Sussex.
ReplyDeleteThey all say pretty much the same thing. In the early days of the NHS it was run by medical practitioners and staff who had considerable control over budgets and resource allocation. It worked quite well and didn't cost spiral.
Gradually other parts of the social care system got taken over by government busybodies and do-gooders with politics… and the NHS had to take up the slack.
Elderly care broke so the wards filled with the old and senile who healthy enough couldn't care for themselves.
Mental care broke so the wards filled with disturbed patients who healthy enough couldn't care for themselves.
Need I go on?
Eventually the do-gooders and bean counters arrived in the NHS and now half their budgets pay executive wages.
We wonder why its broken?
Dalrymple's accounts are detailed and devastating. And he worked at the bottom of it.
ReplyDeleteWolfie said it far better than I could.
ReplyDeleteIt is unnecessary to invoke anecdotal accounts and impressions.
ReplyDeleteAs a matter of public record:
"The NHS has seen a year-on-year fall in productivity despite the billions of pounds of investment in the service, latest figures show. The data from the Office for National Statistics showed a fall of 2% a year from 2001 to 2005 across the UK."
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/7610103.stm
As for how the NHS compares with healthcare systems in other west European countries, the regular annual review of European healthcare continues to find the NHS rates as fairly mediocre:
http://www.healthpowerhouse.com/files/canadaIndex03.pdf
The particular characteristic of Britain's NHS is that it combines a social insurance scheme for personal healthcare costs with a verging-on state monopoly provider of healthcare services. Healthcare systems in other west European countries have avoided that combination and concentrate instead on social insurance schemes. The NHS was created at a time when state-owned industry monopolies were highly fashionable in Britain and where the prospect of "competition" between service or product suppliers was considered threatening. Governments in other west European countries didn't start out with that mindset. Whether by coincidence or not, in European comparisons the NHS comes out fairly well down the performance league table.
Try: What Obama can lean from European healthcare, by Steven Hill
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/steven-hill/what-obama-can-learn-from_b_173154.html
The French Health Care System
http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/9994.php
It may come as a terrible cultural shock to many but credit for first implementing a national insurance scheme for healthcare goes not to Britain for creating the NHS in 1948 but to Count Otto von Bismarck, first Chancellor of the German Emprire.
“The Health Insurance bill . . was passed in 1883. The program was considered the least important from Bismarck’s point of view, and the least politically troublesome. The program was established to provide health care for the largest segment of the German workers. The health service was established on a local basis, with the cost divided between employers and the employed. The employers contributed 1/3rd, while the workers contributed 2/3rds . The minimum payments for medical treatment and Sick Pay for up to 13 weeks were legally fixed.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto_von_Bismarck
Whatever else, Bismarck was no socialist.
Whatever Bismark was, Mr. B, he probably was a socialist. Hayek informs us that the Prussian is a natural for it.
ReplyDelete"Few people will deny that the Germans on the whole are industrious and disciplined, thorough and energetic to the degree of ruthlessness, conscientious and single-minded in any tasks they undertake; that they possess a strong sense of order, duty, and strict obedience to authority. All these make the German an efficient instrument in carrying out an assigned task, and that has accordingly been carefully nurtured in the old Prussian state and the new Prussian-dominated Reich.
What the German is often thought to lack are the individualist virtues of tolerance and respect for others, independence of mind and readiness to defend one’s own convictions against a superior, and of that healthy contempt and dislike of power which only an old tradition of personal liberty creates. These individualist virtues are virtues which flourish wherever the individualist or commercial type of society has prevailed and which are accordingly missing as the collectivist or military type of society predominates."
It is no accident that the country that inaugerated the social security system was the cradle of Fascism and Marxism. The rise of Fascism was not a reaction against the socialist trends of the preceding period but a necessary outcome of those events.
The moral of the story is, don't even try it if you are not German. Are we all Germans now?
interesting comments all
ReplyDeleteI thought you would all like to know: a seminal paper on the economic rationale for national social insurance schemes for healthcare costs is now available online with kind permission of the American Economic Association:
ReplyDeleteKenneth Arrow: Uncertainty and the welfare economics of medical care (AER 1063)
http://www.who.int/bulletin/volumes/82/2/PHCBP.pdf
See also these relating "Reading notes"
http://hadm.sph.sc.edu/COURSES/Econ/Classes/Arrow.html
Bob, NHS productivity is now on the way up again:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.hsj.co.uk/news/finance/its-official-nhs-productivity-is-rising/5002594.article
The NHS is also much cheaper than the US system.
http://flipchartfairytales.wordpress.com/2009/08/14/the-nhs-as-good-as-us-heathcare-but-much-much-cheaper/