As I have said before, I believe the market provides the most efficient and humane mechanism for carrying out health care rationing. If you believe government bureaucracies can do a better job, I recommend this story in The Telegraph:
The NHS should not always attempt to save someone’s life if the cost is too much, the medical regulator has ruled.
Britain’s National Institute for Health and Clinical Guidelines (NICE) has recommended that the NHS abandon the ”rule of rescue,” which requires clinicians to treat dying patients without regard to cost. Why?
When there are limited resources for healthcare, applying the ‘rule of rescue’ may mean that other people will not be able to have the care or treatment they need.
In making this ruling, by the way, NICE ignored the advice of its own Citizen’s Council, which insisted that “a rule of rescue was an essential mark of a humane society.” The NICE bureaucrats were not impressed:
Nice defended its ruling last night saying that the Citizens Council provided useful input to its decisions but that the organisation’s role was to determine how best to allocate the health service’s limited resources.
Giving the government control over health care spending—-whether you call the system socialized medicine, single-payer, or universal health care—-is to give them control over your life.
Think this sort of thing could never happen here? Read this.
Comments 5
As I can’t post anything of great consequence now, all I can do is gasp with admiration at the new low levels to which you’ve stooped recently - it hardly seems possible. We had 32% wanting a complete healthcare rebuild - no matter you say - but by reckoning that’s a little matter of 80 million people. As for the market being a fairer way of killing people, the mind really does boggle at how you can compare the gross inequality in American healthcare with the high standard of care available to all, free at the point of care, to all Britons. You can argue all you like about the marginal benefit of experimental drugs, but that’s not where the vast bulk of care lies.
Posted 13 Aug 2008 at 2:49 pm ¶“As for the market being a fairer way of killing people, the mind really does boggle …”
Glad to hear from you again, Marc, but I feel compelled to point out that the market doesn’t kill anyone.
No one in our system would even consider withholding treatment based on cost. I have many times seen hospitals and physicans devote copious resources to save indigent and homeless patients whose ability to pay was nil.
At no time in my two decades in the health care biz have I ever encountered a single hospital or doctor that would consider the cost before deciding to save someone’s life.
Posted 13 Aug 2008 at 3:29 pm ¶Marc,
Do you mean this “high standard of care available to all” Britons?
http://www.computerweekly.com/Articles/2008/08/13/231806/patients-left-untreated-at-barnet-and-chase-farm-hospitals-nhs.htm
Posted 13 Aug 2008 at 5:10 pm ¶‘but I feel compelled to point out that the market doesn’t kill anyone.’
Sorry David - this just isn’t true in the US. The excess deaths thanks to lack of health insurance are a matter of record, as are the huge health inequalities that blight your country.
‘No one in our system would even consider withholding treatment based on cost.’
This of course is not true. Across the spectrum of healthcare many millions of Americans go without treatment or drugs because they can’t pay. According to your own government (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) last year one-fifth of Americans couldn’t afford one or more of these services: medical care, prescription medicines, mental health care, dental care, or eyeglasses.
Posted 13 Aug 2008 at 6:26 pm ¶Marc, even if these tired canards had any basis in fact, they wouldn’t be relevant.
NICE is telling the NHS to let patients die if the cost of treatment exceeds some arbitrary number set by some apparatchik.
That’s hardly the same thing as someone forgoing a pair of eyeglesses until they dig up he money to pay for them.
As to dental care, NHS patients have been reduced to pulling their own teeth because they can’t get in to see a dentist.
Posted 14 Aug 2008 at 8:28 am ¶Post a Comment