Life After the State by Dominic Frisby

Author:Dominic Frisby
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Economics, Non-fiction
Publisher: Unbound
Published: 2013-11-04T12:59:43+00:00

From National Health to Rude Health

In my opinion, our health care system has failed when a doctor fails to treat an illness that is treatable.

Kevin Alan Lee, author 156

It is not as simple as just going back to the friendly societies, of course. When these groups were in their prime, medicine was comparatively primitive and low tech. Mostly you went to a GP who gave you medicine with full authority. Occasionally you might need surgery, staying in hospital for a few days, or weeks, but not needing very intensive care. That has changed enormously. Many procedures might now be best done in specialized centres, perhaps one for a whole district or region. There is always going to be the problem of insurance driving up costs. Procedures such as liver transplants, which can cost over £250,000 ($400,000), will probably remain beyond most people’s pockets for a long time to come. A national bureaucracy of transplant organs might be more efficient than a local one. But these are all issues that a free market can address and solve.

In both the NHS and the American system of insurance we have a huge organization – a voracious government monster – that consumes tremendous amounts of resources. It is unstoppable. It keeps on feeding. As it does so, through lack of accountability, subsidy and waste, it pushes up the price of everything. We then have to tax people more to feed it. The more we tax people, the less money people have, and they become dependent on government. And the monster that is the state gets bigger and more expensive.

The amount of capital that would be freed by an efficient system of health care is breathtaking. It would make for the most tremendous opportunities elsewhere. And it would happen on both sides: on the one hand individuals would pay less; on the other they would have more money, as the state would take less from them.

At present, choice in services is limited. Patient or consumer control of the medical provider is limited. Until we have patient control, our service will be a long way short of what it can be. Meanwhile, I bet there are a figurative million things GPs, nurses and others who work in the NHS don’t like about it and would change, if they could. In a free market, under their own auspices, they can make those changes – and be properly rewarded for them.

Both in the UK and the US, health care was better in relative terms and more affordable, before the government got involved and turned it into a political tool. Health care would be better and cheaper without government now.

But how do you do this? How do you make the transition? How do you get consumer control and patient power back to Britain? No politician who wants a career will ever recommend abandoning the NHS, even if the numbers are compelling. It would be political suicide. ‘The National Health Service is the closest thing the English have to a religion,’ said former Chancellor of the Exchequer, Nigel Lawson, in his memoirs.

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