Why the UK Is Ditching Socialized Medicine

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Front Page Magazine:

There is more than a little irony attached to the Obama administration’s determination to pursue socialist, EU-style “solutions” to America’s problems, even as the European Union is coming to grips with the bitter realities such socialism produces. And while Greece and its financial problems receive some media coverage in the United States, there is a much bigger story flying under the mainstream media radar: in Britain, Prime Minister David Cameron has introduced a bill seeking to partially privatize the National Health Service (NHS). Why? Because the British government is “hoping to avoid a Greek-style financial meltdown.”

The system’s defenders are upset. The Times of London is reporting that Health Secretary Andrew Lansley is in the eye of the storm. “Andrew Lansley should be taken out and shot,” said an unnamed “Downing Street source.” “He’s messed up both the communication and the substance of the policy.” The source further contended that Lansley was “a disaster” and “a law unto himself.” The British Medical Association and the Royal College of Nursing also want the bill withdrawn, as do members of the Royal College of Pediatrics and Child Health, the Royal Medical Colleges, including the Royal College of GPs. Unions, including the Royal College of Midwives, want to “kill the bill” as well, while Labor Party leader Ed Miliband accused Mr. Cameron of failing to listen to the experts.

Cameron refuses to back down, insisting there’s too much bureaucracy in the system, and that it interferes with patient care. “If we were as good at treating cancer as the average European country, we would save 5,000 lives a year,” he contended. He further noted that reform will create “a fair system that stops the private sector from picking off contracts and the public sector from providing an inflexible monopoly.” Yet he insisted that “health care for all, free at the point of use, unrelated to the ability to pay” will remain the animating features of the system.

Such euphemisms are at odds with reality. Last November, the NHS’s Hinchingbrooke Hospital in Cambridgeshire, running at a loss of $8 million a year on revenues of $143 million, was given over to Circle, a private health care company. Circle was brought in to cut bureaucracy and improve efficiency, and it is the first private company to take over an entire British hospital. Earlier this month, an NHS “watchdog” at the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) ruled that a breakthrough drug used to extend the lives of men with late-stage prostate cancer was too expensive to be included in the system. NICE makes calculations based on the “cost of the drug to the NHS according to the number of men likely to be treated.” NICE will pay for some end-of-life drugs for rare diseases. But the current, though unofficial, threshold for QALY (quality-adjusted life year) drugs has been $80,000 for renal cell carcinoma. “Therefore the £63,200 ($101,000) cost per QALY for abiraterone would still not be deemed a cost effective use of NHS resources,” said a NICE statement.