NHS faces biggest financial crisis ‘in a generation’ is the headline of an article published in The Telegraph. The NHS has a deficit of about £1 billion in just the first three months of its fiscal year. You can read the linked article to see the usual excuses offered when a government health program exceeds its budget – which is just about all the time.
What’s the solution to this problem of ever increasing medical costs. The problem afflicts all the world’s developed countries who seemed determined to use the means to cure it that caused the problem in the first place. In other words, all that’s needed is for the government to run its clinics and hospitals better. That would certainly work were it possible. When you have a government program you have a government bureaucracy which eats money like American Pharoah eats oats and which has its own welfare as its primary goal.
If you or anyone or anything purports to be be a rational actor you or it must respond with specifics to the question: What evidence would convince you that your approach to whatever problem is at hand is wrong and should be abandoned? Advocates of government programs that go awry never ask this question as its answer would too awful to contemplate.
The US is about 50% or perhaps a little more towards complete governmental control of medical care. And about 50% of the country believes that the astronomical cost of American medical care can be brought under control by more governmental management of our medical system – the out of control costs of Medicare, Medicaid, and the VA notwithstanding. Nobody asks the question posed above. The inevitable result is that we will get less for more.
This is not a political issue as the right is just as confused about medical care as is the left. The right wants to replace Obamacare with Obamacare just with a different name, while the left wants a single payer system. Neither approach will successfully deal with medical price inflation. A solution that might work cannot be discussed because nobody really wants to consider what might have to be given up for any workable system to succeed. Baseball is not our national pastime, kicking the can is.
My next post will be on music. this subject is too depressing to discuss two times in a row.
