Thanks for posting that. Excellent presentation of the past and future of health care.
"And we cannot rely on the first trend I identified to overcome these dangers. We cannot rely on the increasing sophistication of science to save us from the consequences of our own decisions. "
"They deliver, not occasional intrusive treatment, but lifelong care.
Rather than the doctor being a benevolent dictator he's more a specialist adviser, helping you both to make complex choices about medical care, and to make useful changes to your lifestyle. "
At the time when the Brits instituted the NHS, socialized medicine made a lot more sense than it does now. If you need medical care for the occasional appendicitis or heart attack, what you get is akin to catastrophic insurance coverage. A national pool for that is economically feasible.
But, as this piece describes, that has changed and will continue to change. We're looking now at more of a health maintenance model, which includes personal behavior. That involves more hand holding by professionals, which is costly and never ending. It also suggests the potential for penalties for certain behaviors.
If you look down the road, you can see a place where individuals are expected to exercise for an hour three times a week, for example. The health maintenance function can either refuse to pay the costs for the consequences for the individual's failure to do that or it can pay those costs sending him to aerobics classes, his shrink, his dietician, maybe even his chef. This is a far cry from the appendicitis model. It would inevitably either fail to accomplish its goals, cost an impossible amount of money, or intrude too much into the lifestyle of the individual.
If we were talking about a national health care system of the catastrophic variety, I wouldn't be objecting so strongly. |
