Cal Thomas
1/16/2014 12:01:00 AM - Cal Thomas
BELFAST, Northern Ireland -- While the Obama
administration offers life support to its Affordable Care Act, in the UK a
growing number of people are asking whether it's time to pull the plug on the
National Health Service (NHS), which is in critical condition.
For many years the UK media have carried stories that not
only bode ill for the future of government-run health care, but also continue
to serve as a "code blue" warning to the U.S. as to what might be in
our future if we decide to go down that road.
Writing in The Daily Telegraph under the headline,
"It's time to make difficult decisions about the NHS," columnist
Judith Woods says, "The NHS, dying on its feet for decades, is in a
critical state. The promised injection of cash may stabilize it temporarily,
but the chances of a full recovery are nil."
She is not alone.
A headline in The Guardian, declares the NHS "on the
brink of extinction."
While in America there are concerns about an insufficient
number of younger people signing up for Obamacare, in the UK among the latest
causes for concern is a plan that the Guardian writes "...would only see
new drugs licensed for NHS if judged to be a benefit to wider society."
Does this sound like a close relative of eugenics? Let us
not talk of "death panels," or should we? In the UK, the National
Institute for Health and Care Excellence decides whether new medicines should
be approved. Might it someday also come down to some official deciding who gets
treatment and who doesn't? Changing the name of the decision-making entity
doesn't alter the intent, or the outcome.
Already, according to the Daily Mail, citing a report by
the European Commission (EC), "Britain has fewer doctors per person than
nearly all other European countries." There are just 2.71 doctors for
every 1,000 people. The EC reports the UK ranked "24th out of 27 countries
in the EU, behind some of the poorest countries, including Bulgaria, Estonia
and Latvia." General practitioners are paid 1,500 pounds (about $2,500) a
shift to cover nights and weekends in overburdened ERs. Can one see this crisis
looming on America's horizon as the current supply of doctors proves inadequate
to treat a flood of new Obamacare patients?
What's more, stories about incompetence and corruption
within the NHS, once the exception, are now common. "Blood donors turned
away by clinics' incompetence," says a headline in the Daily Mail.
The NHS was supposed to reduce the number of people who
seek treatment in emergency rooms. Instead, the BBC reports, some patients
visit them as many as four times a week. Citing data from 183 sites obtained
under the Freedom of Information Act, BBC News writes, "...nearly 12,000
people made more than 10 visits to the same unit in 2012-13. A small number of
those -- just over 150 -- attended more than 50 times." The same has
proven true for Obamacare. Obama said that coverage would result in fewer ER
visits, when in fact studies already show that the newly covered are visiting
ERs more frequently.
An editorial in The Daily Telegraph says, "The NHS
is cursed by a devotion to dogma." People have come to expect
"free" care and the cost of "free" is breaking the system.
The editorial recommends everyone visiting a GP should be required to pay 10
pounds ($16) to "discourage those with minor ailments" from making a
trip to the ER.
Dr. Mark Porter, chairman of the council at the British
Medical Association, has said that if the NHS were a country, it would barely
have a credit rating. He warns: "A growing and aging population, public
health problems like obesity, and constant advances in treatment and technology
are all contributing to push NHS costs well above general inflation."
If the NHS can't be sustained in the UK, why would anyone
believe an American experience will be different? The ACA, of course, is not
nationalized health care (people pay insurance premiums, after all) but some
think it could evolve into that.
If it's a question of dogma vs. experience, experience
should prevail. The UK experience with nationalized health care can teach
America something.
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