In the category of “health is way too important to leave to the government,” the Guardian reports: “The number of patients waiting for an NHS operation in England has increased by nearly 6,000, the government admitted today. A total of 827,300 patients were on the waiting list at the end of April – up by 5,700 since the end of March.”
Source link: http://blog.mises.org/3666/well-cut-you-open-in-our-own-good-time/
We’ll cut you open in our own good time
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{ 7 comments }
Impatient to become inpatients?
How many die waiting? That is one way to reduce the health budget – euthanasia by delay.
If you don’t ration by money, you will ration by some other standard, and I can’t think of a case where it would be less corrupt.
Tony Blair was treated promptly — & for free –when he needed medical care. What waiting list? It’s the finest system in the world — immediate treatment & no payment. No wonder the socialist elite love it.
While I agree with the spirit of this report, I am unpersuaded by the relevance of the statistic cited. There are millions of consumers waiting on all sorts of things every day. I’m sure the average number of people in the US waiting for their satellite TV to be fixed on any particular day is much greater today than it was 5 years ago. So what? This could be good or bad.
The real question is whether the waiting time is reasonable. So, I should like to know the waiting time distribution (even just the mean) of selected procedures with some expert’s indication of how long such waits should take.
Now, the ultimate expert is the consumer, so we might compare waiting times for, say, appendectomies in the UK vs. the US for some semblance of a free-market-ish comparison.
Barring that, we might should like a doctor to say that waits greater than X days are statistically linked to poorer outcomes for patients (e.g., higher mortality).
NHS waiting lists for _urgent_ diagnostic scans etc. (for strokes, cancer, neurological disorders, etc.):
Endoscopic investigations, 25% of NHS ‘trusts’ (hospital groupings): 6 months+; 10% of ‘trusts’: 9 months+
MRI scans, 40% of ‘trusts’: 5 months+
CT scans, 33% of ‘trusts’: 4 months+; >10% of ‘trusts’: 6 months+
Diagnostic ultrasounds: 30% of ‘trusts’: 5-6 months+
Nuclear medicine scans, >14% of ‘trusts’: 5 months+
Patients have died waiting for operations. (Had I lived in England, I would long ago have been crippled, waiting for knee operations, or died of breast cancer, or found other cancers had spread, untreated, while I waited for various scans.)
its the same in canada, in usa. for a solution they privatize what is not direct health care, such as janitor, cook,but the real problems is that pharmaceuticals industry is not ethical enough to make safe and long term medication, they make lobbying for an industry who is internationalist while the health care system is nationalist, it has to change.
“The real question is whether the waiting time is reasonable.”
Reasonable is subjective. A tyrant like Tony Blair feels a week is too long to wait for his own medical needs, but 9 months for a critical operation is “reasonable” for the general populace. Perhaps it’s even reasonable to some to let your sickest people die waiting for treatment – to ease the burden on the system.
What’s certain, though, is that a private system will provide treatment as quickly as you can pay for it, and that competition will result in both constant improvement and cost efficiency. For example, it’s remarkable here in Canada how quickly corrective eye surgery was introduced and improved. The cost went from $10,000 to about $2,000 in a matter of years, with practically no wait period, and the rate of technique improvement was rapid – thanks to the fact that this service was left up to the market to provide.
If the government health care bureaucracy had been in charge, I would have had to wait for months or years, my surgery would have been more painful and carried more risks, and it would have cost some poor taxpayer $10,000.
It is disgusting and horrifying the state of socialism in the UK and Canada when it comes to probably the most important demand in life, healthcare! It is not so much different here, except that there isn’t more outrage because the majority of middle class can still afford covereage. The US gov just taxes the crap out of Americans (SSI + Medicare/aid/blah), and the lower class on the margin are the ones who suffer everyday.
Can anyone direct me to more information on the severity of distortion of healthcare here? This probably will be the greatest leap into socialism in the near future…maybe this issue should be our grounds. It is one where people are extreemly interested in, more than socialism on wages even.
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