“All it does is shift who pays.”
No. It’s worse than that.
It shifts who’s paid, too. Taxes don’t go straight to the hospitals. The NHS is at the mercy of the Chancellor, not the patients. And of course, being a government operation, fincance is debt-based: a budget is set at the beginning of the year; if it isn’t all spent at the end of it, next year’s is cut – no arguing. If it is spent, it might be increased.
It makes healthcare a political monopoly. It’s “planned”. So when that planning goes wrong – such as here in 2003, all hell breaks loose. There is no alternative to take up the slack.
It devalues healthcare. GPs’ surgeries are overwhelmed with people who simply shouldn’t be there. People value their health less because the NHS will sort them out. (It never ceases to amaze me how much average Americans know about drugs and treatments – here, it’s “their” job to know all that; we just take what we’re given.)
There’s no redress for poor service (short of actual criminal malpractice). What are we going to do? Refuse to pay? Since we pay through our taxes, that’s very illegal indeed.
Ms. Gould isn’t entirely wrong. The NHS does heal and cure millions of people every year – my own parents owe their lives to NHS hospitals. But it would be a pretty poor collection of doctors and nurses that didn’t. The trouble is, they do it despite being employed by a state monopoly, not because of it.
