What Happens When You Turn Health Care Into a Giant Bureaucracy? UK Edition

Meeting goals are optional. Even when those goals can have life-and-death impacts on people. When key NHS targets were last hit in the UK (and 2 that have never been met)

In the 2000s, the UK noticed that its National Health Service (NHS) was having trouble treating people in a timely fashion. This included goals for seeing a cancer specialist, and associated treatment. They created wait time goals at Accident and Emergency (A&E) wards, what we call Emergency Rooms in the US. The third area was "planned care." This is anything not falling into the emergency surgery category. That includes everything from cataract surgery, to knee and hip replacements. So people were left disabled, in pain, and blind because of poor scheduling.

So they set goals for wait times in all of those areas, but they haven't been very good at meeting those goals.

Key NHS targets in England were last hit on:

• A&E - July 2015
• Cancer - December 2015
• Planned care - February 2016

Things are a little better in Scotland, but Wales and Northern Ireland have never met the A&E goals, and the other goals haven't been met in over a decade. So why have goals that you can never meet? Well, pushing yourself is a good thing, but this is more a case of the goals have no meaning. No one, aside from patients, are penalized for not meeting the goals.

And so people are left to suffer, while the bureaucrats say they are doing stuff to fix the problem, and the problem never gets fixed.

Patients Association chief executive Rachel Power said the analysis showed the NHS was in "permacrisis".

"The health of many deteriorates while they await treatment and their problems become more complex," she said.

In the case of cancer treatment, delay in care can result in death. But hey, it doesn't cost the individual anything. Aside from the life, that is.