The healthscare morons are so in love with our privatized Darwinian system that they’re ready to shoot people to preserve it. They tell lies about Government “death panels” for the sick, completely ignoring the fact that those panels already exist at every health insurer in the country. They have repeatedly cited the British NHS as an example of the perils of a single payer health system, complete with lie after lie about how the British system works. Their lies have gotten so bad that the British Labour party plans to use the American Rushpubliscums and their lies in the next election cycle to pummel the British Conservatives, who are now having to disavow their connections with the American Rushpubliscums.

Since most of these gun-toting inbreds see only FOX “News,” they certainly won’t be seeing this. But you ought to.

How was it formed?
The NHS officially came into being in July 1948, in the wake of World War II, to replace an inadequate system of volunteer hospitals that had, during the war, come to rely on government funding. Doctors and conservative politicians vehemently opposed the NHS in the run-up to its formation, using many of the arguments that opponents of greater government involvement in the U.S. cite today. According to Geoffrey Rivett, author of From Cradle to Grave — The First 60 Years of the NHS, the then head of doctor’s body the British Medical Association (BMA), Charles Hill, gave a radio address in 1948 in which he asked, “Do you really want the state to be your doctor?” Today, the BMA is a champion of the NHS and resists any privatization initiatives. In a statement on Aug. 14, BMA chairman Dr. Hamish Meldrum said, “The NHS is not perfect. But the market-style philosophy of the U.S. is a lesson we could do well without.”

How does NHS health care compare with U.S. health care?
Like most developed countries, Britain ranks above the U.S. in most health measurements. Its citizens have a longer life expectancy and lower infant mortality, and the country has more acute-care hospital beds per capita and fewer deaths related to surgical or medical mishaps. Britain achieves these results while spending proportionally less on health care than the U.S. — about $2,500 per person in Britain, compared with $6,000 in the U.S. For these reasons, the World Health Organization (WHO) ranked Britain 18th in a global league table of health-care systems (the U.S. was ranked 37th). However, there are measures by which the U.S. outperforms Britain: for instance, the U.S. has lower cancer mortality rates.

Does private health insurance exist in Britain?
Yes, and it works in a similar way to health insurance in the U.S. Many employers offer private health-insurance plans as a perk to workers — a minority of patients opt out of the NHS system to receive their medical treatments privately. Private patients can choose their specialists and avoid waiting lists for non-emergency procedures; NHS patients wait an average of about eight weeks for treatments that require admission to a hospital, four weeks for out-patient treatments and two weeks for diagnostic tests. While NHS patients have a choice of hospitals, they cannot always choose their specialist.

Is it true that NHS bureaucrats put a price tag on life?
The short answer is yes. The NHS has a body called the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) that decides which new treatments and drugs the NHS should pay for. One of the factors NICE considers when deciding whether to approve funding for a new treatment or drug is cost-effectiveness. To determine the dividing line between what is cost-effective and what isn’t, it must set a threshold. Taking its lead from Britain’s Department of Transport — which has a cost-per-life-saved threshold for new road schemes of about $2.2 million per life, or about $45,000 per life year gained — NICE rarely approves a drug or treatment that costs more than $45,000 per life year gained. In short, NICE does not want the NHS to spend more than $45,000 to extend a citizen’s life by one year.

While NICE’s decisions have angered some doctors and patient groups — particularly some oncologists who say they are unable to prescribe expensive, life-extending cancer drugs — mainstream politicians, the media and most Britons accept NICE’s rare rejections as a necessary compromise to keep universal coverage affordable in the face of rising health-care costs. As NICE chairman Sir Michael Rawlins recently told TIME, “All health-care systems have implicitly, if not explicitly, adopted some form of cost control. In the U.S., you do it by not providing health care to some people. That’s a rather brutal way of doing it.”

Is it true that old people receive inferior care on the basis of their age?
NICE uses what it calls “citizens councils” to help it sort through difficult ethical issues, and one of the decisions the councils have made is that age should not be a factor in the institute’s approval process — that is to say, a year of life should be considered as valuable to a 77-year-old as to a 12-year-old. In every part of the system, a 77-year-old has the same access to treatment as anyone else in Britain.

The whole article is good, and worth a few minutes of your time. But if you come away with anything, it should be that Britain’s NICE does monitor cost-effectiveness, but they do it as a way of keeping the population as a whole healthier. This might seem a little harsh, but there is undoubtedly a side-effect that isn’t mentioned here: as in, the greed of pharmas will automatically be tempered by this kind of a system. I am guessing British pharmas are far more reasonable in their profit margins than American ones are. Contrast this with the way healthcare is rationed here in the US, with a bean counter deciding whether or not to treat someone would impact the profit margin too much and dent the multimillion-dollar bonus pool of the health insurance executive.

If I had to choose a way, it’d be the NICE way of doing things. What say you?

Tags: britain, healthcare, nhs

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 18th, 2009 at 4:59 pm and is filed under Healthcare Crisis, Jolly Roger. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.