rocket finance

Since We are on the Subject: National Healthcare

Most who visit this blog are looking for personal finance posts, but as we enter the election season here in the States, the subject of healthcare is on everyone’s radar screen. Here are three pieces that I consider pertinent to our upcoming election, yesterday’s discussion and my pocket book.

The first is an article from the London Telegraph in August of this year. It states that UK cancer survival rates are the lowest in Europe. That fact is not so remarkable - many countries have difficulty with one disease or another. However, long waiting periods for health care are cited as the reason for the mortality rate.

The second piece is written by the National Coalition on Health Care that is based in Washington D.C. In it, England’s national health service is studied and evaluated. Here is an excerpt that Americans who plan to vote in the next election need to consider when making their decision.

The British health care system is experiencing serious problems with its funding, service, and staff that vary in severity across the region. A long-standing problem has been long waiting times for care, particularly for elective services and procedures. In the United Kingdom in 1990, 41.2 percent of Britons reported waiting more than 12 weeks between seeing a specialist and receiving surgical care. A NHS watchdog group reported that some PCTs lack essential senior staff, forcing “some practices to close their lists, while other areas suffer from a severe lack of district nurses. There are also long waiting lists for therapists, particularly physiotherapists.” Another study found that for the past several years, waiting to see a specialist and waiting for elective surgery have been ranked as the first and second most critical failures of the NHS.¹² There are also allegations of declining quality of equipment and staff; another group, Audit Scotland, found that a quarter of all NHS equipment in Scotland has become dangerously outdated, while “only half of Scotland’s health trusts could demonstrate that staff had a proper understanding of the equipment.” Together these factors have contributed to serious dissatisfaction with the health care system. In the London Telegraph, Sheila Lawlor declared that the question was “who provides the healthcare and whether we get value for money. The answer, patently, is that we do not.” Those who can afford it may opt for private care: conservative shadow health secretary Liam Fox suggested that the number of people opting for private care rose by 29% in 2001 because of dissatisfaction with the NHS.  A recent poll found that 35% of British citizens ranked health care the most pressing national issue. A 1999 poll found that a slim majority of 55.7 percent were very or fairly satisfied with their health care system, while 42.3 percent were fairly or very dissatisfied with it.

Citations for the above quotation are found in the original document.

A third more recent article also comes from the London Telegraph and states:

Record numbers of Britons are flying abroad for essential medical treatment, in order to avoid long NHS waiting lists and the rising threat of deadly hospital superbugs. Patients needing vital surgery are travelling as far as India and Malaysia, where operations cost half the price charged in Britain’s private hospitals.

The British system of nationalized health care seems to be in worse trouble than the current US system of private health care, yet we are being told that our system should look more like theirs. Do you want to put the people who have bungled education, social security and a whole host of other things in charge of our health care too?

What does this mean for me? It means that while healthcare in the US is certainly expensive, at least I can get it for myself and my family. I certainly could not afford to outside the system to purchase my own private care or fly to India for surgery.

Maybe I will have the money if we raise taxes to pay for nationalized healthcare. Not likely.