Great Britain’s National Health System has no choice but to privatize some medical treatment options if it is to survive. That was the conclusion of a recent report put together by representatives of the British Medical Association, the Royal College of Nursing, patients, private health providers and other stakeholders.
Barring some sort of privatization, the rationing which already exist informally within the NHS will have to be occur formally in order to avoid bankrupting the system.
Great Britain faces the same problem that all socialized medical systems face. When the cost of medical treatment is free to the end customers, the demand for medical treatment is extremely high. Since resources are not unlimited, something has to give.
Great Britain, like most socialized health care systems, keeps costs down informally through extremely long waiting periods. Surgical procedures that might take two or three months at most to schedule in the United States can keep a patient on waiting lists for a year or more in Great Britain. In addition many advanced treatments and expensive medications that are considered routine treatment in the United States are simply not available in Great Britain because they are simply too expensive.
But the bottom line is that delaying procedures and limiting treatment options has merely forestalled the day of reckoning. Without massive funding increases — which is a nonstarter politically — the system is in trouble.
And this is the system that folks such as Ralph Nader say the United States should adopt. No thanks.
Source:
Rationing ‘only option’ for NHS. The BBC, February 7, 2001.