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Old February 24th, 2008 #1
Alex Linder
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Default Health Care

Britain’s health care amounts to malpractice

By Deroy Murdock
February 23, 2008

Before American voters embrace either Hillary Clinton’s universal-health scheme or Barack Obama’s single-payer proposal, they should consider the avoidable deaths that plague the mother of all state-run medical programs: Great Britain’s big-government National Health Service. Low-quality, taxpayer-funded health care killed more than 17,000 Britons in 2004, according to the TaxPayers’ Alliance in London.

The TPA examined the World Health Organization’s data to contrast the NHS with the Dutch, French, German and Spanish health systems, which are less government-dominated. While those four countries averaged a 106.6 amenable mortality rate, Britain was almost 29 percent deadlier, with its rate of 135.3. The TPA thus calculates that the NHS took the lives of 17,157 Britons who otherwise would have survived were they treated by doctors across the English Channel. Comparing 60 million Brits to 300 million Yanks, this is like a federally operated health agency eliminating 85,785 Americans.

“Anyone looking to reform the American health-care system should learn lessons from the European experience,” says TPA analyst Matthew Sinclair.

No one can complain that the NHS is underfinanced. This year’s budget is $210 billion - about $1.05 trillion if adjusted to match America’s population.

The British Department of Health supervises the NHS. In turn, the NHS includes Primary Care Trusts, NHS Trusts and Regional Strategic Health Authorities. Drugs are controlled by the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence. The NHS Pay Review Body oversees staff compensation. Connecting for Health runs the National Program for IT, reportedly Earth’s single, largest information-technology initiative. Within this maze, patient needs often yield to the wants of pols and medicrats.

The consequences for these political considerations can be ugly.

Poor sanitation has become the NHS’ latest worry. The British government estimated that 9 percent of inpatients in 2000 suffered hospital-acquired infections.

Diseases snuff Britons sooner than they do others in the developed world. A September 2007 Lancet Oncology article found 66.3 percent of American men alive five years after cancer diagnosis. Only 44.8 percent of Englishmen survived after five years. Across the European Union, 20.1 females per 100,000 under 65 died prematurely of circulatory disease. Among British women, that number was 23.6.

Collectively, these data strongly rebuff the notion that America’s imperfect health-care industry needs a booster shot of mandates and regulations.

John McCain’s ideas - among them, expanded health-savings accounts; individually owned, portable health-insurance policies available across state lines; and tort reform - are the antidote to the “health care with a British accent” that Clinton or Obama would import.

http://news.bostonherald.com/news/op...position=rated