The Flaws of Government-Run Health Care
From across the Pond comes yet another tale of government-imposed suffering via socialized medicine, this time in Britain’s National Health Service (NHS):
The NHS is unable to perform 1.5m operations a year because of a drastic shortage of anesthetists, a report reveals. More than 8 million patients are on waiting lists across England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. Many are in urgent need of a surgical procedure.
But an alarming lack of anesthetists—specialist doctors who provide anesthesia and pain relief before, during and after operations—is preventing the health service from performing about 4,000 procedures a day, the most comprehensive review of anesthetic services has found.
Note that over 8 million people—more than one-tenth of the United Kingdom’s population—are on waiting lists to receive health care. To borrow Bernie Sanders’ famous phrase, THIS is the society that “treats health care as a human right?”
The story also reveals how low pay, and government policy that allocates care via bureaucracy, mean millions of patients have to wait for important, and potentially life-saving, surgical procedures. Donald Berwick, the former Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Administrator and proud advocate of single-payer health care, believes that government bureaucrats can effectively and efficiently allocate resources within the health care system. In a 1993 interview, Berwick said that “I want to see that in the city of San Diego or Seattle there are exactly as many MRI units as needed when operating at full capacity. Not less and not more.”
The story’s last paragraph proves the falsity of Berwick’s claims. In responding to the report, an NHS spokesman highlighted 4,500 new training placements as a way to address physician shortages. But “when asked how many of those 4,500 additional training placements would be for anesthetists, a spokesperson said they were unable to say, and would set out which specialty areas would gain the extra posts ‘in due course.’”
In other words, the bureaucracy doesn’t know how to allocate resources—and could well end up divvying out training placements due to political or other considerations. What Berwick sold as a government-managed utopia has instead become a cruel dystopia for millions of British patients waiting to receive surgical care.