March 7, 2013
Socialized Medicine: Missed the last horror story from Great Britain's government health care system? Don't worry, another alarming report will come soon. They just keep piling up like firewood in the fall.
On our minds right now is the story from the Daily Mail, which reported last week that nearly 40% of National Health Service workers — doctors, nurses and paramedics — said they would not recommend their own workplace to friends or family who need care.
More than 101,000 NHS workers responded to a survey that asked them if they agreed with the following statement:
"If a friend or relative needed treatment, I would be happy with the standard of care provided by this organization."
While 63% said they agreed or strongly agreed, 12% said they disagreed or strongly disagreed while a quarter, reports the Daily Mail, "did not 'express a preference.'"
"That left 37% of staff who did not recommend treatment."
This finding is a significant indictment. Even worse, at two of the system's worst hospitals, only 35% said they would recommend care at their workplace, and 17% overall said they "did not think patient care was their manager's top priority."
What would be a manager's focus, then? Saving money in a state-run system that can't tax enough to pay for the care it has promised?
Playing the bureaucratic game in a regime in which health care decisions are made by politics rather than by the patient and doctor working together?
One hospital within the NHS no longer subject to politics is Hinchingbrooke. The facility, located in Cambridgeshire, north of London, was privatized last year after, the Mail reports, being "on the verge of going bust."
But now, NHS data show it is "ranked as one of the highest" hospitals for "patient happiness and waiting times." It "tops the list for short waiting times" and patient satisfaction has increased to 85%.
The private company operating the Hinchingbrooke facility has "dramatically cut losses at the hospital by 60% and will soon begin to pay off burgeoning debts racked up from years of mismanagement."
The improvement has been so profound that another hospital, the George Eliot in Warwickshire, might follow Hinchingbrooke's lead.
So what changed at Hinchingbrooke? The incentives.
The hospital went from an unresponsive, inefficient bureaucratic shambles in which patients were not its central mission to a private enterprise that has to make a profit, which means it must satisfy its customers.
The future of American hospitals is that of the Hinchingbrooke facility before it went private. ObamaCare is a hard step toward a single-payer system run by the government. The American hospitals of tomorrow might not be under direct government control in an identical model of the British NHS. But they will be under Washington's indirect control since it holds the purse.
Washington will therefore be making health care choices for patients it doesn't know, setting pay for doctors and nurses, rationing treatment, operating an inflexible bureaucracy, and killing the incentives for professionals and workers to provide quality treatment, timely care and clean facilities.
Even before the Democrats' Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act became law, the government's share of health care spending in the U.S. was roughly 45%. Thanks to the law, it's headed even higher.
Writing last year in Forbes, Chris Conover, a physician and scholar, reported that when ObamaCare takes effect, "the private sector's share of health care spending will be reduced to a mere 33%." Which means the government will control two-thirds of health care.
This should be unacceptable in a free society.
It should be unacceptable to anyone who understands that government involvement is destroying health care in Britain, a nation that, as many have pointed out, has had more than 60 years to prove that socialized medicine works but has actually shown the opposite.
The evidence just keeps rolling in.
IBD
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