People who want the United States to adopt a single payer health care system might want to take a look at the most recent in a long line of crises afflicting Great Britain’s health care system: it seems they are going to start rationing braces.
Since the cost of braces is free, the demand is very high. According to the BBC, the amount of orthodontic work performed in Great Britain doubled just in the last decade. As a result the health care system is running out of money to pay for orthodontic work. Already some children wait as long as four years for braces.
Now the National Health System plans on using a rating system to assess how serious a child’s orthodontic problems are, and only those children who have the most serious problems will receive braces. As Tim Pollard of the British Orthodontist Society told BBC News Online, “This is rationing. There is no doubt about it.”
The health system is trying to defray some of the costs by lowering the amount of money it pays orthodontists for operations. But the system already pays orthodontists so little that the country has less than half the number of orthodontists per capita as France and Germany, and lowering the rates it pays will likely drive that rate even lower.
Source:
Braces ‘to be rationed on the NHS’. The BBC, June 5, 2001.