I’m not a fan of the government-distorted health system in the United States.
Various laws and programs from Washington have created a massive problem with third-party payer, which makes America’s system very expensive and inefficient.
But it’s possible to have a system that is even worse. Americans can look across the ocean at the United Kingdom’s National Health Service.
Our British friends are burdened with something akin to “Medicare for All.”
But it’s even worse because doctors and nurses are directly employed by government, which means they have been turned into government bureaucrats.
And government bureaucrats generally don’t have a track record of good performance. That seems to apply to health bureaucrats, as captured by this Alys Denby column for CapX.
Numbers are no way to express a human tragedy, but those in the Ockenden Report into maternity services at Shrewsbury and Telford Hospital NHS Trust are nonetheless devastating. The inquiry examined 1,592 incidents since 2000. It found that poor care led to the deaths of 201 babies and nine mothers; 94 babies suffered avoidable brain damage; and one in four cases of stillbirth could have had a different outcome. That’s hundreds of lives lost, and hundreds of families suffering unimaginable pain, all on the watch of ‘Our NHS’. …the report is strewn with examples of individual cruelty and incompetence. Bereaved parents…were given excuses, false information and even blamed for their own child’s death. The Health Secretary has said that vital clinical information was written on post-it notes that were swept into the bin by cleaners. …The NHS has a culture of arrogance, sanctimony and impunity.
And here are some excerpts from a 2021 article in National Review by Cameron Hilditch.
The NHS has proven itself comprehensively and consistently incapable of dealing with a regular flu season, something that crops up at the same predictable time of year in every country north of the equator. It has long been obvious that Britain’s single-payer health-care system isn’t fit for purpose even in normal times, much less during a global pandemic. Yet the NHS’s failures are systematically ignored. …age-standardized survival rates in the U.K. for the most common kinds of cancer are well below those of other developed countries, which translates into thousands of needless deaths… The excess deaths that the U.K. is suffering…along with the crushing physical and mental burdens borne by British doctors and nurses ultimately redound to this long-term failure of British culture. By transforming a medical institution into a cultural institution for the sake of forging a new, progressive national identity, Britons have underwritten decades of deadly failure.
This is damning information.
To be sure, mistakes will happen in any type of health system. But when government runs the show, the odds of appropriate feedback are much lower.
If you don’t believe me, click here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.
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Image credit: FrancisTyers | CC BY-SA 3.0.
