Fox reporter David Asman got an interesting look inside the British health care system when his wife suffered a stroke while on vacation in London. Asman notes the good and the bad about the British system of medicine: British medical personnel tend to be very compassionate, but they’re forced to work with outdated and jerry-rigged equipment. British doctors are far less worried about being sued than American doctors, but make next to nothing after years of training. British medical care passes far less cost to the patients, but those costs are absorbed elsewhere.
Medicine is like everything else – there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch. Asman quotes Thomas Sowell who notes that in health care, there are no solutions, only trade-offs. The quality of British health care is only better than the US if all you need are simple procedures. For anything more advanced, the British health care system is horrendously broken. Just by searching the BBC the evidence becomes overwhelming: a woman forced to sell her home to buy life-saving cancer treatments, private hospitals being forced to butress a failing system, massive shorfalls in trust funds, resistant disease strains running rampant in British hospitals, arthritis sufferers being denied crucial treatments, management failures in call services, an exodus of nurses, and an even more alarming shortage of qualified surgeons.
A system like the NHS, if applied to the United States would be an unmitigated disaster. Such an inflexible system can barely scale to meet the population of the UK, no less the much larger US population. Systems like the NHS don’t reduce the cost of medical procedures, they merely shuffle them around – which means that UK hospitals suffer from a lack of equipment and trained staff. The demand for medical services isn’t going to go down, and a system that’s already straining to provide basic services can’t meet the increase.
As many flaws as there are with the US system, the solution isn’t to embrace more government, it’s to let the market ease things out. The reason for the massive costs of medical care are partially because medical care will always be expensive, but also because of liability and torts, because of our better technology, and because we’re all paying for the free riders on the system. Tort reform will help, but medicine is going to be expensive so long as we continue to treat the uninsured. The best solution for health care reform is to give more power back to the consumer. The lessons from the British system are quite clear — hoping that government can give everyone a free lunch for health care is an illusion. A system that provides the freedom that British doctors have in regards to liability with the increased accountability and competitive pressure of the free market would be the best of both worlds.
For someone constantly professing the need for more “pro-business” policies, it’s ironic that you embrace the continuity of an employer-funded health care system that, at it’s current rate of growth, will soon become a more onerous burden on the American business climate than anything going on in “socialist” Europe. Our post-World War II-era health insurance system is broke beyond repair, forcing a two-pronged ruinous effect. Employers will avoid operating on U.S. soil when a third of their annual payroll goes to health insurance….while other employers will simply ditch their health insurance coverage and swell the ranks of the uninsured to that of Third World countries. And all of this will occur as the average American lives longer and the use of products like cigarettes and fatty foods that reduce long-term health care costs will decline as a result of the nanny state’s misguided quasi-prohibition.
The average American will be sorely disappointed when corporate America’s “tort reform” agenda becomes law as malpractice lawsuits account for less than 2% of health care cost growth. All “tort reform” will accomplish is protecting doctors from real liability when they leave a can of Altoids in their patient’s chest cavity.
The sad thing about this country is that our health care system won’t officially be deemed in “crisis” until Jay Reding finds himself uninsured. Until the rate of uninsured reaches 51%, the current system’s meltdown will continue to be shrugged off by those defending “the competitive pressure of the free market” to remove millions of people who live across the tracks from the ranks of the insured.
I’m curious jay, what would you have the un-insured do? considering by your own admission that medicine will always be expensive, what is the lowest 2 quintiles supposed to do. Are they going to have to trade off food for medicine, or are you just hoping that high risk insurance companies will spring up to pay for it? Or some other method? I’m genuinely interested in your opinion.
Things like tax-free Medical Savings Accounts are part of the solution. There’s no worries about HMOs, patients retain control of their money, and they have every incentive to spend wisely. Part of the insane rise in health expenses is because companies realized that they could bilk Medicare for billions, and the system didn’t do nearly enough to cut down on fraud and abuse. If we can get medical costs down through tort reform, provide tax incentives for medical savings accounts, and help grow the market for low-cost catastrophic coverage, then I think the American medical system would be much better for both patients and the budget.
There’s a point at which there just aren’t any good solutions. Part of it is ensuring that programs like AFLAC which provide catastrophic coverage continue to be available to workers. Of course, there are going to be some people who will always fall through the cracks.
And despite me being generally pessimistic about government assistance programs, that’s a place where there can be a role for government. If someone is simply unable to work and private charity can’t cover the expenses, then I’ve no problem with government aid. I would prefer that the aid programs have as much local control as possible and be exceptionally well audited to avoid fraud and abuse, but almost all conservatives have no problem with government aid to those who are truly in need.