Kristian Niemietz has an excellent CAPX piece on the NHS and healthcare privatisation.
If healthcare ‘privatisation’ killed people, most of Europe would be dead
The NHS used to be Britain’s ultimate sacred cow. It has always had a handful of critics, but their role in the debate used to be, as the writer Ed West puts it, ‘like that of the Middle Eastern wrestlers in WWF whose job was to be booed by the crowd when I was a kid.’
This has, at least tentatively, changed a bit over the past two years. You can now, at semi-regular intervals, find articles in mainstream newspapers which take on the cult around the NHS, and point out the superior performance of European social health insurance (SHI) systems (e.g. here, here and here). The Times is currently running an online poll on the question ‘Should the NHS be replaced by a European social insurance system?‘, and at the time of writing, about 4,000 people have voted yes. (And, no, that’s not just me clicking on the ‘Yes’ button 4,000 times.)
The whole piece is well worth reading, not because it is a new angle but because the NHS has been inadequate for decades and supine acceptance is not an option. The sinister role of the Labour party is also worth reiterating.
As it happens: I have long made the case that the NHS causes tens of thousands of unnecessary deaths every year, a claim which I am basing on a simple comparison of survival rates for cancers, strokes and heart attacks between the UK and its better-performing continental peers such as Belgium and the Netherlands. But I will resist the temptation of claiming that the Labour Party’s figures prove me right, because they prove no such thing. They do, in fact, not prove much at all.
4 comments:
I agree wholeheartedly. But which political party will be brave enough? There has been little progress in reforming or defunding the BBC - and that's easy compared to reforming the NHS.
I suspect the Government (i.e. the Civil Service) like the NHS because it embodies the 'one size fits all' ethos which makes it easy to understand and manage from a bureaucratic point of view. If your malady fits the work practices of the NHS you generally get a reasonable service. But if you have two simultaneous maladies or need long term care you could find yourself outside the menu of usual options and hence ignored or lost - and nobody much cares.
There seem to be an increasing number of people who are yet to be disabused of the idea that command economies work.
I have checked. Lady Swire referred to our new SecDef as 'Von Schnapps'. That puts a new light on it.
DJ - no political party seems brave enough to do anything. Maybe the 'one size fits all' aspect also gives it enough political appeal among the voting public because it makes it easy to understand for everyone.
Tammly - it seems to have something to do with easy ideas having a permanent advantage over a more analytical outlook.
dearieme - ah - seems likely as a quick Google came up with -
"Shapps was sometimes known to the Cameroons as von Schnapps, a nickname which perhaps suggests he was not taken with complete seriousness."
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