As the House moves to repeal the nationalization of health care, Britain plans to take a scalpel to its National Health Service, opening it up to competition and letting doctors and patients call the shots.
It was both a stunning admission and a damning indictment of socialized medicine when British Prime Minister David Cameron in effect admitted that the holy grail of nationalized health care, the British National Health Service (NHS), was broken and in need of fixing.
The “reforms” proposed by Cameron would still leave the British system a thousand miles more to the socialized Left than would anything ever contemplated for ObamaCare. These “reforms” allow private companies to submit competitive bids to provide for contract services, in some situations.
e.g. Here’s what the “reforms” entail:
Well — duhh — no one is proposing taking away control over “management” from family practitioners and giving it to bureaucrats and the way that even single payer Medicare is run is that private companies bid for contracts to run every aspect of the Medicare system. The British “reforms” still keep the government ownership of hospitals and keep most British doctors as government employees. No one is ever contemplating making American doctors into civil servants or nationalizing the private hospital system.
It is a shamelessly manipulative, distorted, and misleading article.
The thing to realize is that there is a “Goldilocks” zone in health care management. The British system is at one extreme. The American system is at the other extreme. The British system could certainly be improved by taking at least baby steps (which is all these current “reforms” are) towards the Goldilocks zone, as could the American system.
P.S. Did you notice, in the article, the “superior” systems to which the British system was (unfavorably) compared? Was the comparison/contrast between the British system and the “superior” American system? No, the contrast was between the British system and the superior systems of Shanghai, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Austria, and Poland.
– Larry Weisenthal/Huntington Beach, CA