Posted by Tina
We promised you it would happen if you elected Democrats and now it is upon us…a national approach to healthcare that will put a BIG government bureaucracy in charge of health decisions for you and your family. The recently passed stimulus bill contains $19 billion dollars earmarked to set up a Health Information Technology (HIT) database system that all doctors and hospitals will use to keep and track health information about patients. It also authorizes the establishment of the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology consisting of a fifteen member board. Think of them as tight faces men in pointy hats and robes, like grand wizards they will sit in judgment from on high making declarations about what kinds of treatments we can have and when we will qualify for treatment…and when we will not. The model for this bureaucratic nightmare is the British National Health Service (NHS). We have posted several stories related to that system and none of them would cheer even the healthiest among us:
** The BBC reports that up to 500 heart patients die each year while they wait for potentially life-saving surgery. The Times reports that a British woman will be denied free National Health Service treatment for breast cancer if she seeks to improve her chances by paying privately for an additional drug. A Daily Telegraph headline reads: Sufferers pull out teeth due to lack of dentists. Doctors are calling for NHS treatment to be withheld from patients who are too old or who lead unhealthy lives, reports another article. patientpowernow.org **
** British cancer patients are substantially more likely to die of the disease than those in other western European countries because of poor access to the latest drugs, according to an authoritative report to be published today. *** While more than half of patients in France, Spain, Germany and Italy have access to new treatments provided since 1985, the proportion in the UK is four out of 10. **
** VANCOUVER, British Columbia, Feb. 23 The Cambie Surgery Center, Canada’s most prominent private hospital, may be considered a rogue enterprise. *** Accepting money from patients for operations they would otherwise receive free of charge in a public hospital is technically prohibited in this country, even in cases where patients would wait months or even years in discomfort before receiving treatment. *** But no one is about to arrest Dr. Brian Day, who is president and medical director of the center, or any of the 120 doctors who work there. Public hospitals are sending him growing numbers of patients they are too busy to treat, and his center is advertising that patients do not have to wait to replace their aching knees. *** The country’s publicly financed health insurance system frequently described as the third rail of its political system and a core value of its national identity is gradually breaking down. Private clinics are opening around the country by an estimated one a week, and private insurance companies are about to find a gold mine. *** a Supreme Court ruling last June…found that a Quebec provincial ban on private health insurance was unconstitutional when patients were suffering and even dying on waiting lists appears to have become a turning point for the entire country. *** “The prohibition on obtaining private health insurance is not constitutional where the public system fails to deliver reasonable services,” the court ruled. **
** Of the 2.7 billion spent on the creation of ideas within the NHS, only a small proportion, 153 million, is actually spent on spreading the innovations down to patient level. *** By spending nearly 16 times more on invention rather than diffusion, millions of pounds is being wasted in generating ideas that are never implemented. *** The report, All Change Please, which interviewed 80 senior healthcare professionals, also highlights the slow uptake of new technologies, devices and drugs in the NHS which contribute to standards of care in UK hospitals falling behind that of comparable countries. Premature deaths from causes that are preventable with prompt and effective healthcare are higher in the UK than in Germany, Canada, Australia and France. *** It condemned the UK’s poor access to CT and MRI scanners and below average uptake of new drugs for treatment of cancers including breast, colorectal and lung cancers. *** An “alphabet soup” of organisations created by the Government to assist hospital trusts lacked a clear strategy for spreading ideas, it said. **