Earlier this month I noted that the health care bureaucrats of the U.K. consider paying fat people to walk a judicious use of taxpayer money. Well, here’s an example what these apparatchiks consider an injudicious use of that money:
Jack Rosser’s doctor says taking Pfizer Inc.’s Sutent cancer drug may keep him alive long enough to see […]
When government apparatchiks run the health care system they do this kind of stupid crap:
Overweight parents will be paid to walk their children to school under plans to tackle the obesity epidemic.
This is Britain, of course, where the same idiots deem certain cancer drugs too expensive. But they have all kinds of money for the […]
Advocates of socialized medicine often cite “equality” as a major advantage of their preferred health care delivery model. Recently, however, the NHS demonstrated that some patients will be more equal than others when government bureaucrats run the system.
An NHS trust has spent more than £12,000 on private treatment for hospital staff because its own waiting times are too long.
In […]
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Posted 21 October 2008
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Few of us actually experience, first hand, the difference between socialized medicine and market-based health care. F. Brinley Bruton has been a patient in both types of systems, and here’s what she says about the latter:
In New York, I never feared that I would be overlooked. At my doctor’s office in upscale Gramercy Park, he and his […]
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Posted 23 September 2008
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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 […]
I spent last week cycling along the Thames, visiting various towns upriver from London. The Brits were unfailingly pleasant. Wonderful people. Which is why this story from the BBC really pisses me off:
People with rheumatoid arthritis should have access to a particular class of drugs limited, NHS advisers say … The National Institute for Health and Clinical […]
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Posted 22 July 2008
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I have written here, here, and here about the British government’s cruel policy of refusing to pay for up-to-date cancer drugs because they are “too expensive.”
And what does the government of Perfidious Albion consider worthy of funding? MailOnline provides a chart showing expenses for which Brit taxpayers must reimburse members of Parliament:
My personal favorite is the last item: “Rent on one […]
Another happy ending for the bureaucrats who run Britain’s system of socialized medicine. Per the Telegraph:
A cancer sufferer killed himself the day after he was denied a new drug on the NHS.
Albert Baxter’s primary care trust wouldn’t pay for the drug Sutent, which constituted his only real hope, so he went home and suffocated himself with […]
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Posted 25 June 2008
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A couple of weeks ago I noted the ironic fact that Edward Kennedy is receiving cancer treatment in the U.S. health care system that he has so often maligned. Robert Goldberg points out another important detail of this story in the New York Post:
With his wealth and power, Kennedy would get good treatment anywhere. But the same care is available […]
I have written before about how Great Britain’s National Health Service compounds its disgraceful refusal to provide up-to-date cancer drugs by punishing patients who are willing to pay for these medications out of their own pockets.
That’s right. If a patient buys a drug like cetuximab or Avastin with her own money, she is no longer entitled to free care via the NHS. The Telegraph reports […]
