The trade-offs: British vs US healthcare

[RatRacer]

Very interesting, first-person experience article on the differences in the British healthcare system and the US one.

...We spent almost a full month in a British public hospital. We also arranged for a complex medical procedure to be done in one of the few remaining private hospitals in Britain. My wife then spent about three weeks recuperating in a New York City hospital as an inpatient and has since used another city hospital for physical therapy as an outpatient. We thus have had a chance to sample the health diet available under two very different systems of health care. Neither system is without its faults and advantages. To paraphrase Thomas Sowell, there are no solutions to modern health care problems, only trade-offs. What follows is a sampling of those tradeoffs as we viewed them firsthand...

http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110006785

[bleedingheart]

1. Mr. Asman is an ass.

This is what I gleaned from this article...

In spite of low pay and somewhat supposedly unclean conditions, British hospitals provided sufficient care for his wife and did it all for around $27K.

His wife had therapy sessions in the US and was charged $27K here...but he leaves out a lot of the details of her care here but she is in a clean hospital run like a military camp.

He insinuates that people who get into medicine in Britain do so for the love of practicing medicine and not the money...how sweet...and that Americans are overpaid and not perhaps as good as the Brits as providing healthcare..but it is squeaky clean and we have lots of new gadgetry.


I say that we can have the best of both and have well paid workers too... but then again Europeans I think have placed more value upon things like quality of life over acquiring every new gadget.

Now I have yet not had the chance to travel abroad but I will say this much.... I have been misdiagnosed by physicians here in the US. I have had doctors make almost fatal mistakes that would have left me 6 ft under. I have had ER docs admonish me for not drinking enough water because my urine was dark instead of testing it for problems...which resulted in me going to another hospital to find out I was fighting a virus that had damaged my liver.

So....there is no perfect world...all the way around...

[RatRacer]

3. Well, I didn't take it that way...

I took it pretty much as he stated early in the piece...there are trade-offs, but few real "solutions."

The "new gadgetry" thing I can understand. We probably replace things too quickly, but then again, that's better than gerry-rigging things with duct tape and bailing wire.

I did like the "group diagnosis" model that was used more in Britain. Too many US docs let ego get in the way of good medicine.

Also, the "cost" of the British care seemed out of whack on one hand (too low actually with relation to what it really costs), but it also didn't reflect the real cost in taxes, fees and other such things that are built into the system. In other words, even for a British citizen, healthcare isn't really "free".

I just found the whole thing interesting and it perfectly sums up my own dilemma with how our healthcare system should be adjusted/changed/fixed. Trade-offs, trade-offs.

Not sure where the "Mr. Asman is an ass" thing is coming from though.

[bleedingheart]

6. I felt an underlying theme of how "good work" can be found at "low wages"

and I find that the part that makes him an "ass". There are many good healthcare workers here in the US who are paid well but also love their job and they went into that line of work because they loved it as well....not for the cash.. The only ones assured of doing well financially are physicians that specialize and sometimes that isn't a guarantee.

[RatRacer]

8. I guess we just interpreted that differently

I took it to mean that because of the low wages, the people who were doing it were doing it out of a real love for what they do and they people they help, because it certainly isn't out of a monetary motivation.

[bleedingheart]

2. I also forwarded this article to the hospital at Queen's Square

I wonder how they will feel about Asman's views and wonder if they won't be offended.

[RatRacer]

4. I guess that depends...

...on how accurate he was. He seems to point out their excellent bedside manner and the advantage of group diagnosis. But either the hospital is not clean and lacking in good, working, basic equipment or it isn't.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

5. What I've heard from real live British expatriates is

that the NHS has been seriously underfunded since Thatcher's day, which prompts hospital administrators to scrimp on things like maintenance and private rooms.

[GCP]

7. Thatcher privatized the cleaning operations in hospitals in the UK

And they've gone downhill ever since. When I lived in the UK, up to 1980, nobody ever said the hospitals were dirty, but that's all I ever hear whenever I go home and visit relatives now.
Thatcher ruined the UK in more ways than has ever been analysed. She ruined mining villages and a whole class of workers. She ruined the steel industry and another whole class of workers, and she tried to get rid of the NHS, but she didn't get her way with that one. The north of England, with Scotland and Wales suffered horribly with unemployment because of her trickle down theories - yes Milton Friedman had his dead hand on British economics also.
Thatcher is the reason we left Britain. :grr: