Healthcare Rationing in UK

Socialized medicine update: Britain cancels 50,000 surgeries as NHS hospitals face winter crisis, by Philip Klein 1/3/18, Washington Examiner

 

Health Service has abruptly canceled 50,000 non-emergency surgeries due to overcrowding at hospitals this winter.

Sanders, I-Vt., has lamented that the United States "ends up spending almost three times per capita what they do in the UK," which is "guaranteeing healthcare to all people." Yet here is what life is like for those living in the supposedly more humane system, as reported by the Telegraph:

Every hospital in the country has been ordered to cancel all non-urgent surgery until at least February in an unprecedented step by NHS officials.

The instructions on Tuesday night - which will see result in around 50,000 operations being axed - followed claims by senior doctors that patients were being treated in “third world” conditions, as hospital chief executives warned of the worst winter crisis for three decades.

Hospitals are reporting growing chaos, with a spike in winter flu leaving frail patients facing 12-hour waits, and some units running out of corridor space.

The nation's health secretary, Jeremy Hunt has defended the move as “a planned, methodical, thoughtful” approach. He told Sky News, "We recognize that it is better, if you are unfortunately going to have to cancel or postpone some operations, to do it in a planned way … Although if you are someone whose operation has been delayed I don’t belittle that for one moment and indeed I apologize to everyone who that has happened to." He went on to praise the "heroic" efforts of NHS workers.

As the American Left tries to push single-payer into the forefront of the national conversation, it's important to have a real conversation about the tradeoffs involved.

In the U.K., having the government "guarantee" healthcare while trying to contain costs results in strained medical services, turning one of the largest economies in the world into a "third world"-like environment. The NHS "guarantee" doesn't always translate into actual access to care when you need it.

The other option is to throw more money at the system, in which case single-payer becomes much more costly than promised. It's also worth thinking about the cultural component.

Do we think Americans are going to stand for a system in which government officials cancel surgeries en masse based on bureaucratic judgments about what is urgent and go on TV to offer inadequate apologies?

http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/socialized-medicine-update-britain-cancels-50000-surgeries-as-nhs-hospitals-face-winter-crisis/article/2644827

Comments

The UK is big on bureaucracy with lots of government employees. This boat anchor will continue to make the UK struggle to compete.  They need to de-bureaucratize while leaving the EU.

Norb Leahy, Dunwoody GA Tea Party Leader