ONLY ONE patient amongst 1000 offered treatment at Dundee’s private hospital to cut NHS queues has declined to attend Fernbrae.The vast majority of the local electorate votes for socialist politicians of various parties, but when it comes to experiencing "up to two years on the waiting list" there seems to be little objection to "going private". Of course, I'm only talking about "going private" in a limited sense - the taxpayer still meets the bill. As a good libertarian I don't think that there's any reason for the state to be involved in health matters whatsoever, whether by employing doctors, operating hospitals or financing either. (See here.)
As long as the majority believes (erroneously) that taxpayers should be coerced into paying for health care I concede that a second-best solution would be to have health vouchers. At least the state wouldn't be operating the health system. It's often claimed that Scots insist on state provision of health and welfare as well as state financing. I'm not so sure:
While very small numbers of local patients have been diverted to Fernbrae for treatment paid for by the NHS in the past, nobody knew how the public would respond to such a large number of patients and a significant sum of cash being taken out of the NHS.It rather looks like almost everyone is perfectly willing to use private health facilities, so let's privatise the lot. That odd one person in 1,000 can emigrate to Cuba.
1 comment:
Comments made on previous template:
EU Serf
Neil is making the classic mistake that funding and administration have to be combined. Its quite easy to see that even if you want to have government funded healthcare, it doesn't have to be government run.
After the state is never any good at running anything, why should medicine be any different.
7 April 2005, 14:58:05 GMT+01:00
– Like – Reply
dearieme
Neil, I have no argument with the need for public health provision, although the NHS has proved a bummer on MRSA (a bug that was never mentioned when we lived in Aus). Personally, I'd like to know more about pre-NHS provision: I remember the expression "the panel" from childhood, but have no idea what it was. Are the assumptions about pre-NHS Britain as inaccurate as the indoctrination schoolteachers often get about pre-state-provision schooling? Dunno. Anyway, even if you have a state health service, it surely needn't be as mutton-headed as ours is proving to be?
Harry: thanks for adding to my list.
6 April 2005, 12:07:01 GMT+01:00
– Like – Reply
Stuart Dickson
- I believe a health service can be justified on the basis that much ill health does not reflect on the virtue of the patient but is pure bad luck... "
The standard protection against bad luck is to buy insurance, eg. house insurance, car insurance, travel insurance. Why then is there not a National Car Service?
Bloomin' heck. I'd better not give the buggers any more "bright" ideas.
- "... the rich & powerful get it almost as easily as the poor so it is obvious that it is in the interest of society to act against it irrespective of wealth."
Are you saying that the NHS is (yet another) cushy govt. bribe to the middle classes, and not the portrayed saviour of the poor.
4 April 2005, 21:13:56 GMT+01:00
– Like – Reply
Neil Craig
That is an interesting theory Dearieme & there maybe something to it, equally it may be that medical breakthroughs produced the very expensive operations which, without a NHS, normal people could not afford (the application of leeches may not work but they are cheap).
I believe a health service can be justified on the basis that much ill health does not reflect on the virtue of the patient but is pure bad luck & since the victim is not to blame it is right for society to rally round.
There is also a pre-NHS justification for social action against infectious disease. Disease is very much a social experience - the rich & powerful get it almost as easily as the poor so it is obvious that it is in the interest of society to act against it irrespective of wealth. This is also the entirely non-libertarian but correct argument for mass vaccination.
4 April 2005, 19:06:04 GMT+01:00
– Like – Reply
Harry Powell
Dearieme, that's an interesting argument though we could perhaps add to that list the mass vaccinations against polio, tuberculosis and the like. It has to be granted that those public health programs were a success, and yet the striking thing about adoration for the NHS is that it persists despite failing to do what it's architects envisioned - namely withering away as the nation's health improved. To explain that we might say, to paraphrase Parkinson's Law, the amount of illness expands to fill the provision made for it.
4 April 2005, 17:48:30 GMT+01:00
– Like – Reply
dearieme
Have I bent your ear on the fundamental explanation of why the NHS became the national religion, displacing the CoE and CoS? Because of the fluke that the nationalisation of the hospitals coincided with the arrival of the drugs that let physicians cure people: penicillin, sulfonamides, steroids. Had the NHS been set up in 1920 or 1970, it would have proved, shall we say, more malleable.
4 April 2005, 16:47:33 GMT+01:00
– Like – Reply
Bill (Scotland)
I had to laugh when I read the last sentence (-;
Bring it on, I say.
4 April 2005, 12:30:44 GMT+01:00
Post a Comment