Universal Neglect
By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY | Posted Tuesday, November 06, 2007 4:20 PM PT
Health Care: The officials who run Great Britain's National Health Service apparently don't believe patients need the benefits of medical innovations. Advanced medicine costs too much, so they can just go without.
Medical treatment will always be rationed. Care may be abundant in many parts of the world, but it's not unlimited. The question, then, is who does the rationing? The patient? Or the government?
For years we've warned readers that the universal health care model those on the left have been trying to force on the country will establish a system in which the state takes over medical treatment and makes decisions for the sick.
The ugly reality of this is evident in Britain, where the NHS is denying cardiac patients access to a vital device.
"The Health Service's rationing watchdog says drug-coated stents used to treat around 30,000 patients a year are not cost-effective and should no longer be provided," Britain's Daily Mail reported last week.
Surgeons say that holding back drug-coated stents will actually increase NHS' costs because many patients who don't get the stents will eventually need expensive heart bypass surgery. No matter. The bureaucracy has spoken, and decisions have been made in the ivory towers that affect others.
Briton Edward Crane didn't need a stent earlier this year, but he did need hip surgery. So what does the NHS do? It cancels four scheduled consultations with Crane. Fed up, the 75-year-old retiree, who had paid into the NHS for decades, spent his life's savings to have a hip replacement performed by a private practice.
Many Britons swear by their system, but they are not the ones who have been denied care, put on long waiting lists or rudely neglected, as Crane was, because bureaucrats are doling out the care.
No comment on universal care would be complete without mentioning Canada, home of the Great White Waiting List. For an industrialized nation, Canada's shortage of modern medical equipment is alarming. Among Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development countries, the Fraser Institute notes in a recent study, Canada ranks No. 13 out of 24 in access to MRIs, No. 18 in CT scans and No. 7 out of 17 in access to mammograms.
Clearly, Britain and Canada are not the ideal places to get sick.
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