Posted on 07/24/2010 4:54:40 PM PDT by re_tail20
Perhaps the only consistent thing about Britain’s socialized health care system is that it is in a perpetual state of flux, its structure constantly changing as governments search for the elusive formula that will deliver the best care for the cheapest price while costs and demand escalate.
The new British government’s plan to drastically reshape the socialized health care system would put local physicians like Dr. Marita Koumettou in north London in control of much of the national health budget. Even as the new coalition government said it would make enormous cuts in the public sector, it initially promised to leave health care alone. But in one of its most surprising moves so far, it has done the opposite, proposing what would be the most radical reorganization of the National Health Service, as the system is called, since its inception in 1948.
Practical details of the plan are still sketchy. But its aim is clear: to shift control of England’s $160 billion annual health budget from a centralized bureaucracy to doctors at the local level. Under the plan, $100 billion to $125 billion a year would be meted out to general practitioners, who would use the money to buy services from hospitals and other health care providers.
The plan would also shrink the bureaucratic apparatus, in keeping with the government’s goal to effect $30 billion in “efficiency savings” in the health budget by 2014 and to reduce administrative costs by 45 percent. Tens of thousands of jobs would be lost because layers of bureaucracy would be abolished.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
nationalized health care is a bell that can’t be unrung.
UK: Axe falls on NHS [Socialized Medicine] services
yitbos
Perhaps Barack Obama should take a trip across the pond to Great Britain. I’m sure he can fix their health care.
Quick...Someone tell Berwick!!
ping
The answer to the Brit’s health care problems is to push it back into the private sector. People should be responsible for their own health care expenses and decisions. Let a thousand insurance plans flourish.
The only government policy issue should be at what level of income and assets is a person considered to be indigent and thus eligible to receive full government payment for their expenses and at what level is a person considered to be fully capable of paying their entire bill.
This is the same conversation we must have in the US.
As I’m reading the article, the NYT doesn’t seem upset at all the system is bankrupting the country and leaving people with horrid care.
What they mention over and over, is that “jobs are going to be lost because layers of bureaucracy are being removed”.
And therein lies the problem. In the education system over here, it is pathetic and upsetting to realize that these people are not concerned about educating the kids as much as having a teacher entitlement class.
When did the means become the end?
Looks like we will all be considering a move to England in the near future!
Talk about Inconvenient Truths.
They’re still headed the wrong way on immigration and Islam. New Zealand may be the ticket.
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