Europeans are moving to a more market based less socialized healthcare system:
newcoalition.org
Free-Market Movement
The Stockholm Network, a European think tank that advocates market reforms, released a survey last year showing patients across eight countries in Europe were losing faith in their socialized health plans. More than four in five of the 8,000 interviewed expressed a willingness to travel across borders for medical care.
Growing discontent with some European national health systems also is reflected in the trend toward private health insurance, once a rare option in countries with socialized medicine.
The best figures available to me are from 2003. That year, citizens of the UK spent $7.7 billion on private health insurance products. Private medical insurance covered 12.7 percent of the population. Interestingly, 8 percent had "cash plans," which are very similar to our health savings accounts.
Thanks to the Internet, Europeans are witnessing the power of free markets in other countries. EU consumers know more than they used to about how it is possible to be treated better and how many more medical procedures are available in a timely manner elsewhere.
Some Europeans use the Internet to shop around for medical services in the United States as well as other less-restrictive health care environments, where waiting nine months for joint replacements is not the norm. It is becoming more common for an English patient to get on a plane and fly to Spain to get a knee replacement in two months, or fly to St. Louis and get a knee replacement in three weeks.
Maybe because, of these kinds of wait times. From the 2005 AR for the Department of Health in the UK:
7.2 In line with the NHS Plan (7.1), maximum inpatient waiting times will fall to six months by the end of 2005. The maximum waiting time for a first outpatient appointment will fall to three months (13 weeks) by the end of 2005.
7.3 As set out in the NHS Improvement Plan (7.2), by the end of 2008 no one will wait more than 18 weeks from GP referral to the start of hospital treatment and those with urgent conditions will be treated much faster. For the first time, there will be a single target that covers all the stages leading up to treatment, including diagnostic procedures and tests such as MRI scans.
7.4 Since 1 April 2004, the standard maximum waiting time for an inpatient appointment has been nine months and the standard maximum waiting time for a first outpatient appointment has been 17 weeks. Latest figures (December 2004) show that around seven out of ten inpatients are admitted within three months of decision to refer. The average wait to be seen for an outpatient appointment is around six weeks.
7.5 Although there are a very small number of patients not being seen within these maximum waiting times, this should not detract from the real and significant achievement that the vast majority of Trusts have virtually eliminated inpatient waiting times of over nine months and outpatient waiting times of over 17 weeks. PCTs and trusts are now concentrating on eliminating waits to meet the December 2005 targets.
dh.gov.uk
This article pretty much sums up the problem:
independent.org
Price Controls on Health Care Abroad are Failures
The tragic effects of price-controls, whether direct caps on medications and health services or budgetary caps on providers and health service institutions, can be seen in every country that has tried them. Indeed, the whole concept of budgetary caps , is particularly worrisome, as foreign examples of such a price control-based policy clearly show.
In Germany for instance, at the beginning of 1993, the government moved to tighten its global budgeting of the country’s national health care system. The burden of this belt-tightening was to be felt first and foremost by numerous German pharmaceutical firms.[7]
Price controls were placed on some drugs and in the New York Times, Ferdinand Protzman reported a litany of price controls' predicted effects: shortages producing dissatisfied patients intimidated doctors, workers losing their jobs, reductions in research and development budgets, and the development of government-induced cartels.
In Japan, patients covered under government-sponsored health plans often use the private sector for faster, better quality aid, and in order to realize sufficient revenues, Japan’s government-subsidized physicians commonly have to see more than 40 patients a day. If they can’t break into the shortage of private health care services, infirm Japanese have been known to pay steep bribes to circumvent the rationed health care system in order to get direct access to health care providers being reimbursed by the government, through its global budgeting policies on what it will spend for the citizenry’s health care.[8]
Similarly, out of a population of 57 million, one million Britons are queued up on extremely long waiting lists to see physicians for both routine and serious conditions, thanks to the rationing that follows price controls and budget caps.[9] Indeed, the British tabloid press loves to sensationalize all too frequently, unfortunately the deaths of patients still on waiting lists. On an annual basis for example, the number of British patients denied treatment include 9,000 for renal dialysis, as many as 15,000 for cancer chemotherapy, as many as 17,000 for coronary artery surgery, and 7,000 for hip replacement.[10] In contrast, the U.S. rate of cardiac pacemaker implants was more than four times that of Britain and 20 times that found in Canada, and CAT scanners are three times more available per capita in the United States over Canada, and six times that found in Britain.[11]
Inefficiencies from government controls further manifest themselves in the gross bed mismanagement found in hospitals. Despite the long waiting lists in Britain and Canada, one in four beds remains empty at any time, with hospital occupancy rates at 74% for acute beds and 82% for all beds.[12] Yet 25% of acute care beds are being utilized by so-called “bed blockers” for long-term nursing home purposes, often at 600% the cost.[13]
Additional absurdities abound in the British National Health Service, where while price controls leave the chronically ill to die waiting for treatments, the system pursues an enormous make-work jobs program of services for those in good health. British citizens, for example, annually take almost 20 million ambulance trips, equal to one trip per citizen per year, and of which 91% are for non-emergency purposes such as taxiing elderly patients to local pharmacies.[14] “Health visitors” treat 4.1 million people in their homes, and chiropodists treat another 1.1 million. 33 million meals are delivered to people’s homes, more than 17,000 telephone attachments are installed in homes, and government workers arrange telephone rentals, help more than 49,000 with home alterations, arrange 63,000 vacations, and assist 346,000 people with assorted personal appliances.[15] If instead of such “caring,” the National Health Service were merely to charge the full costs for the $90 million in sedatives, $32 million in antacids and $11 million in cough medicine spent annually, it could treat as many as 15,000 additional cancer patients and save an additional 3,000 kidney patients.[16]
Shortages from price control-induced rationing are also felt heavily in rural areas and among minorities. For example, the wealthier North East Thames region near London has 27% more doctors and dentists, 15% more hospital beds, and 12% more total health spending per capita than the more rural Trent region in the northern region of England.[17]
That the British medical system’s rationed failures have not created more of a stir on this side of the Atlantic is indeed testimony to the bureaucracy’s campaign of propaganda and disinformation.
Despite egalitarian claims to the contrary, the British government’s system of controls has utterly failed to end inequalities. The official government task force on the subject in fact found little evidence of any change since the system’s adoption in 1948.[18] Consumption of health care services by people in Britain’s highest social class was 40% higher than by people in the lowest social class.[19]
Rationing continues as before, and commoners pay the price in time away from treatment. Little wonder then that some 6.6 million Britons are turning to private health plans or just paying cash for treatments for which they would otherwise still be waiting as subjects of government health care.[20]
Even Austalia isn't immune, look at this article on dental care:
medicalnewstoday.com |
