If You Have to Wait 10 Years for Health Care...

How much health care do you actually have? Decade-Long Backlog in U.K.’s National Health Service

Elective is a funny term in the health care industry. It includes things like cancer screening. And when you are talking about cancer screening, 10 years can be a very long time indeed.

There are men, women, and children currently scheduled for screenings and elective treatments here in Northern Ireland who are expected to receive neither until 2031 a.d. Several oncologists have given interviews to various British media outlets over the past week basically conceding the likelihood that many of my neighbors here in Ulster will die of cancer and other fatal diseases in the coming years without ever having been diagnosed. More and more are turning to crowdfunding in an attempt to access private treatment in a timely manner.

There is a lot more. Comparisons with other countries. It is worth a look.

It’s true that the NHS is less expensive on average than the medical regimes in many of these countries, but this is mostly due to the kind of wartime rationing by which the National Health Service allocates resources. As the economist Kristian Niemietz notes:

Innovative medicines and therapies that are routinely available in other high-income countries are often hard to come by in the UK. Any country could keep healthcare spending in check by simply refusing to adopt medical innovation.

But the Brits still love their NHS! (Hat tip to Political Hat.)