The New York Times, that arm of the vast right-wing conspiracy, has this:
Britain Plans to Decentralize Health Care
Perhaps the only consistent thing about Britain’s socialized health care system is that it is in a perpetual state of flux, its structure constantly changing as governments search for the elusive formula that will deliver the best care for the cheapest price while costs and demand escalate.
Face it guys, no government bureaucracy has ever been able to deliver “the best of” anything for “the cheapest price while costs and demand escalate.” Why?
Because that’s where market forces come in.
Continuing with the article (emphasis added),
Practical details of the plan are still sketchy. But its aim is clear: to shift control of England’s $160 billion annual health budget from a centralized bureaucracy to doctors at the local level. Under the plan, $100 billion to $125 billion a year would be meted out to general practitioners, who would use the money to buy services from hospitals and other health care providers.
The plan would also shrink the bureaucratic apparatus, in keeping with the government’s goal to effect $30 billion in “efficiency savings” in the health budget by 2014 and to reduce administrative costs by 45 percent. Tens of thousands of jobs would be lost because layers of bureaucracy would be abolished.
In a document, or white paper, outlining the plan, the government admitted that the changes would “cause significant disruption and loss of jobs.” But it said: “The current architecture of the health system has developed piecemeal, involves duplication and is unwieldy. Liberating the N.H.S., and putting power in the hands of patients and clinicians, means we will be able to effect a radical simplification, and remove layers of management.”
The health secretary, Andrew Lansley, also promised to put more power in the hands of patients. Currently, how and where patients are treated, and by whom, is largely determined by decisions made by 150 entities known as primary care trusts — all of which would be abolished under the plan, with some of those choices going to patients. It would also abolish many current government-set targets, like limits on how long patients have to wait for treatment.
Meanwhile, here in the USA, we’re heading exactly to the point where the UK is right now.
Sweetness & Light (where I found the above NYT link) points out,
We posted about this development two weeks ago. But, as usual, the New York Times waited for the low readership of a Saturday mornings during a lazy summer weekend to publish their version of events.
After all, they don’t want their readers to realize that the rest of the world is moving in the opposite direction from us with their ‘healthcare reform.’
Indeed.
More on the mixed newspaper reports from James Joyner.
Post re-edited to include the last sentence, which was omitted.
