What Happens When Health Care is a Government Budget Item?

Nothing Good. NHS plans 'unthinkable' cuts for diabetes and mental health patients to balance books - as new boss declares pensioners' care 'unacceptable' | Daily Mail Online

People in favor of Socialized Medicine love to hold up the United Kingdom's National Health Service (NHS) as an example of how good things are. The only problem is that they haven't looked at it in a couple of decades.

The NHS is currently facing some budget problems. They got an extra £11 billion, but that mostly went to raises for a class of doctor that hadn't seen a raise in a very long time. And even with that, they have issues.

It comes as Sir Jim yesterday also slammed the 'unacceptable' care patients have received from the NHS—particularly for the elderly—which has become 'normalised'.

When socialized medicine doesn't want to admit to rationing health care, they just report on waiting times. Waiting in hospital emergency rooms. Waiting to see a specialist. Waiting to have surgery.

86% of NHS trusts are also cutting HR, Communication, and the like, though they don't say how much, or how big that expenditure is. It's a bureaucracy, so I expect it to be large.

All the constituencies are clamoring "save our jobs!" But no one is asking for the market to be put back in charge of allocating resources.

And they don't say it in the article, but in previous go rounds on the problems of the NHS, no one in England wants to be a doctor, and work for the largest bureaucracy in the country. And endure years of low pay. The doctors who got the raise mentioned above were the resident doctors, the people working too long at Accident & Emergency wards, what we call Emergency Rooms on this side of the pond, and other places.

At least they haven't gone to Canada's solution, which is to just kill the expensive patients.

The US has similar problems, because we also don't let the market dictate the terms of pay and staffing. Medicaid and Medicare only pay a certain amount for certain things. That value is set without regard to what it actually costs to supply the care, whether that be an ambulance ride, or whatever. But I have never seen a case, where letting a bureaucracy dictate to the market solves the problem. Whatever problem you have, more government is not the solution.