A Nod To The Gods

Don’t know if true or not but wouldn’t surprise me a bit.

This article on Britain’s Nation Healthcare System is an eye opener, and I had no idea that the system had been around as long as it has.

A few excerpts:

 

Consider Britain’s National Health Service, established in 1948. In 2017, the British House of Lords issued a stunning report on the state of the NHS. It concluded, “Our NHS, our ‘national religion’, is in crisis and the adult social care system is on the brink of collapse. No one who listened to the evidence presented by a vast array of expert witnesses who appeared before us can be in any doubt about this.”

 

Regarding British performance, medical outcomes for the world’s top killers, cancer and heart disease, is another big story. While American patients’ survival rates for cancer, such as breast, colon, and prostate cancer, are among the highest in the world, the British performance is comparatively poor.

The reason: British cancer patients do not benefit from the kind of robust investment in combatting cancer that characterizes American health care. That investment includes not only the recruitment and deployment of more highly-trained medical staff to serve the patient population, but also a greater reliance on advanced medical technologies and cutting-edge pharmaceutical therapies.

The British, operating under a government “global budget” for health spending, do not even come close to the American effort.

And their summation:

To improve the delivery of health care, Americans need not convert to anything even remotely resembling Britain’s secular “national religion.” Rather than destroy what’s working in American health care, Washington policymakers should take decisive steps to lower health costs through intense competition and empower individuals and families with greater personal choice of coverage and care.

Every time government gets involved in our lives it takes a slice for itself. Bureaucrats create administrative oversight requirements (more government agencies and workers) and more data requirements to be reported back to these agencies. More overhead. And so big government was both a primary cause and a primary beneficiary of the system we have today.

Despite all the debate in DC and the media about the national healthcare crisis, the status quo serves all players except one — the public. The Beltway bloviates about affordability but ignores the basic question: Why does healthcare cost so much? Where are the initiatives to lower high healthcare costs?

As the healthcare segment grew, it became an increasingly important source of campaign contributions. In the 2016 election cycle in round numbers at least $500 million from healthcare and health insurance interests went into campaign coffers. A growing healthcare segment of our economy is a growing source of campaign contributions. An example of the quid pro quo was the ACA’s “risk corridors”. At the public’s expense, participating insurance companies were protected by government against financial losses. Insurance companies — experts at managing risk — pulled a fast one in managing their own risk by transferring it to big government (and more specifically, taxpayers).     Here….