NHS leaves a British woman to die because she went outside the nationalized health system.
A Grandmother whose free NHS treatment was withdrawn because she paid privately for anti-cancer drugs has died.Yesterday Linda O'Boyle's husband condemned the policy behind the decision and said it had made his dying wife's last months even more stressful.
Mrs O'Boyle, 64, had been receiving state-funded treatment - including chemotherapy - for colon cancer.
But when she took cetuximab, a drug which promised to extend her life but is not available on the NHS, her health trust made her start paying for her care.
The victim's husband, an NHS manager, has had his eyes opened by the experience:
Mr O'Boyle, an NHS manager for 30 years, said: 'I think every drug should be available to all of us if there's a need for that drug to be used.'I offered to pay for it but was told I couldn't continue with the treatmentwe were receiving at the hospital-The consultant was flabbergasted - he was very upset.'
He added: 'I was always very anti private treatment. But everything she had wasn't working and it was a last resort. ...
Medical experts say the ban on co-payment is one reason why Britain has one of the worst survival rates for cancer in Europe.
But at least rich people and poor people all get to die evenly! Too bad they have to die at the level of poor people, though.
(HT: The Pirate.)
I thought this was the money line to describe national health care:
I really don't understand your point. This policy could be corrected without altering the socialised model for medicine that we operate in Britain. Therefore, this is not a problem with socialism in medicine per se.
Your objection to socialism is a matter of taste.
Pirate: cost/benefit analysis must be done -- money spent on cancer drugs can't be spent on burn wards etc. But this is always true: your insurance policy won't pay for every shiny new treatment of uncertain effectiveness either.
The cancer survival rate is the low point in British health care, stemming from a almost total lack of investment and attention given to cancer from WW2 until the '90s. Figures already show marked improvement as a result of concerted effort in this area.
mauyr - Your statement is doubly false. It is simply not true that one can fix the problem of low funding in socialism. One can, to a certain extent rob peter to pay paul but that's not a solution. Every account in a socialist government has a turn at playing paul, all to the good, but they have more frequent turns at playing peter and overall effectiveness goes down. You recognize this when you talk about the 50 year lack of investment in cancer treatment (cancer care playing peter) turned around recently as it's made a priority (cancer care playing paul). Soon enough, some other thing is going to be prioritized and cancer funding will be slashed to pay for it as soon as the politicians think that enough people have stopped paying attention. The dynamic is well known and undeniable after a century of watching all sorts of socialists from hard core leninists to soothing slow-go fabians repeat the same old cycle.
It is also not true that an objection to socialism is a matter of taste any more than an objection to gravity is a matter of taste. Socialism does not work. It never has. People die of it all the time and those who favor it and think their position makes them morally superior generally wish to wave away reality when those deaths are brought to their attention. Shame on them, and if it applies, shame on you for advocating such an objectively dirty, rotten, immoral fraud of a system.
Mauyr, I think there's a reason for the rule, though I don't know enough about the subject to know the reason. The NHS didn't just randomly come up with a rule to punish people for spending their own money on cancer treatment. They did it for a reason, and I think that reason comes naturally from the premises of socialized medicine.
BB: As far as I know different regions treat this rule quite differently, so it's not an idealogical problem.
TML: The improvement in cancer care in the UK is partly down to more money spent, but it's mostly due to more attention paid to the processes and practices around screening, diagnosis, monitoring etc. The best practices of those hospitals with the best survival rates have been adopted nationally. We've bought some newer equipment / scanners etc. but most of the expensive stuff is useful across other hospital activities too... I'm not sure that it comes down to robbing peter really, it works out as a positive-sum game in this, and other cases.
I'm afraid I failed to grasp the point of your comparison of socialism to gravity. It doesn't make sense to either object or approve of gravity; it does make sense to object or approve of socialism.
I'm not sure I'd claim to be a socialist. That said, I am deeply proud of two somewhat socialist British institutions: the NHS and the BBC. It is also my feeling that certain natural monopolies are better controlled collectively than exploited by profit-driven companies. None of this is because of the supposed moral superiority of a government's vote-motive to a company's profit-motive; but simply because it can work better. The BBC is better than the commercial media, the NHS is better than most private hospitals.
It depends on the type of market. I have examples that show off capitalism excellently too.
Mauyr - Socialism isn't one single policy but rather a system of policies. Any one single foul up can be fixed, and is, by making several others worse. So while it's true that cancer care can be improved, the money you rob from child care, bridge maintenance, and art shows eventually has to be fixed as well. Eventually, it will be cancer care that is the one that is robbed and you'll get less money and a lower pick level in terms of management staff and once again cancer care will become an inadequately funded backwater that doesn't keep up with state of the art.
Any one slice of the system can be made into a showplace right up to the moment where the whole thing inevitably collapses in a mass of inefficiency and its discontents. This collapse is inevitable. The only choice is when you abandon socialism, you do it in a principled fashion and admit it doesn't work or you do like the leninists did several time in the USSR (see "NEP period" for a great example) and label introductions of capitalism as a new kind of socialism. After a century and millions dead and more millions with their lives ruined this progression is as reliable as gravity, thus the comparison.
The BBC is not better than the commercial media. If the outlet did not exist, other distribution outlets would pick up the decent BBC content and "improve" in your eyes. The NHS is not better than private hospitals. After accounting for the market distortion effects, government enterprises usually are not. In the few cases where they are, privatization usually leads to further improvement.
Well, I understand your point but I don't agree. Any economics has the impossible task of satisfying infinite wants with finite resources. Individuals are at least as capable of making poor choices as a government is. Furthermore, it is to the short-term advantage of those companies who provide a palette of choices to cater for those foolish demands. Sometimes the most prudent choice is not one that any individual would make unilaterally, (though they would vote for everybody to do it collectively).
You mean that socialism fails as surely as objects fall? Perhaps. Some objects don't fall though. And some institutions, such as the BBC, work pretty well.
I disagree that if the BBC did not exist, commercial outlets would pick up its decent content. Commercial outlets' job is to deliver the audience to advertisers; the BBC's job is to deliver content to its audience. That is not a trivial difference. The "effects of market distortion" are easily observed by examining foreign markets where commercial outlets are a greater fraction of the total media.
Aside from your expectation for publicly funded services to fail, what is your basis for the claim that the NHS is not better than private hospitals? (I have some personal experience of each, fortunately not a statistically significant amount, and some relatives in the industry.)
Mauyr wrote:
Exactly, yes! The key insight of capitalism is that individuals should have the freedom to assign their own resources to their own wants, rather than trusting some bureaucrat to do it. If the assignment is then "less than optimal" according to some third party, at least the person suffering for the lack of optimality both a) is responsible for causing it, and b) able to fix it by changing their own behavior.
When some bureaucrat is making decisions then everyone is forced to use HIS gauge of optimality rather than their own. People lose control of their own assets and therefore have no ability to follow their own optimality preferences.
That's evil, and I mean it literally.
MW: Yay for capitalism. Seriously. Where it works it works well. But it's not for everything: the sector where even you'd have to agree with me is the armed forces. I believe it is not the only one.
a) big deal. It's the tyranny of the majority writ large. Even if I paid for my fair share of the army, it won't make any difference unless everybody else joins me. If I ride a bicycle and eschew short-haul airplane journeys and insist on taking all my meals from locally sourced produce, but everybody else continues to burn petroleum in their bark yard for fun, many scientists wouldn't be surprised if sea levels rose as a result. It wouldn't be my fault, but I'd be just as effected as everyone else.
b) Except he isn't, not always. The classic game theory dilemmas demonstrate plausible situations where each person acting in rational self-interest causes problems.
In general, capitalism is good in markets where individuals' rational self-interest is not harmful.
There are other markets in which we must cooperate. Naked capitalism does not invest enough in boring but necessary things like drains, immunisations, the military and education. For things like those my feeling is, personal freedom takes a far back seat to getting the job done. I don't consider it evil to want the govt to compel everybody to pay for the drains and defense.
But those who would argue against any kind of socialism always present it as being thrust upon a population by a dictator. I was talking about the BBC and the NHS, and Lutas has been implying that all this rotten socialist talk is going to kill me and millions others. I don't see that happening, frankly. I'm happy to assert that an elected government presiding over a sensibly mixed economy is quite capable of avoiding evil.