From Andrew Stuttaford at National Review: "Much of the recent talk about "death panels" has been greatly overdone, but this interesting WSJ piece by Rupert Darwall (a Brit, I would add) is a neat reminder of the way the U.K.'s National Health Service at least indirectly reflects the interplay between life's two great inevitables — death and taxes." Some excerpts:
"...America's health-care debate provoked a near unanimous response from British politicians boasting of the superiority of their country's National Health Service. ...
"This outbreak of NHS jingoism was brought to an abrupt halt by the Patients Association, an independent charity. In a report, the association presented a catalogue of end-of-life cases that demonstrated, in its words, "a consistent pattern of shocking standards of care." It provided details of what it described as "appalling treatment," which could be found across the NHS...
"The case for ObamaCare, as with the NHS, rests on what might be termed the "lump of health care" fallacy. But in a market-based system triggering one person's contractual rights to health care does not invalidate someone else's health policy. Instead, increased demand for health care incentivizes new drugs, new therapies and better ways of delivering health care. Government-administered systems are so slow and clumsy that they turn the lump of health-care fallacy into a reality....
"According to the 2002 Wanless report, used by Tony Blair's government to justify a large tax hike to fund the higher spending, the NHS is late to adopt and slow to diffuse new technology. Still, NHS spending more than doubled to £103 billion in 2009-10 from £40 billion in 1999-2000, equivalent to an average growth rate of over 7% a year after inflation.
"In 1965, economist (and future Nobel laureate) James Buchanan observed of the 17-year old NHS that "hospital facilities are overcrowded, and long delays in securing treatment, save for strictly emergency cases, are universally noted." Forty-four years later, matters are little improved. "
Read the rest:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203917304574412680569936844.html
http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=ZGEzYTA4MmYzMWQ2NzUxY2E0YzFjYmQ0OTUxNmE0YWU=
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