Here’s some horrifying news from the United Kingdom, where the government-run healthcare system allowed 239 patients to die of malnutrition in 2007. Another 8,000-plus entered the system for malnutrition and actually deteriorated.
In 2007, 239 patients died of malnutrition in British hospitals, the latest year for which figures are available. A wag might say it must be the English cuisine. But the real roots of this tragedy lie in Britain’s government-run medical system, which tells us something about what we might expect from ObamaCare in the years ahead. A British charity, Age U.K., has been seeking for years to raise awareness of the issue. Yet despite increases in screening, training and inspection programs, the problem has only gotten worse. The charity reports that in 2007-2008 148,946 Britons entered hospitals suffering from malnutrition and 157,175 left in that state, meaning that hospitals released 8,229 people worse-off nutritionally than when they entered. In 2008-2009, that figure was up to 10,443. The problem is not a lack of food. Hospital malnutrition mostly affects the elderly or otherwise frail, who often need individualized mealtime assistance. Spoon-feeding the elderly may not seem like the best use of a nurse’s time, but for some it may literally be a matter of life and death. Yet the constant scarcities created by government medicine, along with the never-ending drive to trim costs, has led the National Health Service to give nurses additional responsibilities and powers in recent years. Inevitably, this leaves them with less time to make sure patients are getting fed.
No system is perfect, so the point of this post is not to assert that there is something especially inhumane and/or incompetent about the British system. Instead, the real lesson is that doctors and hospitals generally try to please the people paying the bills. In government-run systems, that means appeasing politicians. This doesn’t preclude good patient care, but it does mean that other factors may have too much of an impact on decisions. In a market-based system, though, medical professionals have a greater incentive to focus on patients.
I should also say that this is not an endorsement of the American system, which also suffers from the third-party payer problem. In part, this is because of direct government financing, but also because of excessive use of insurance caused by government-created distortions.
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[…] before about the sub-par government-run healthcare system in the United Kingdom, including patients dying of malnutrition, patients suffering needless pain and discomfort, and patients dying from poor care (additional […]
[…] I’m not a fan of Britain’s wretched health system, but my immediate instinct is to take the side of the NHS and make some snarky comment about personal responsibility. Perhaps, for instance, we should ask Mr. Mason whether a government official was holding a gun to his head and forcing him to eat an average of 20,000 calories every day? […]
[…] I’m not a fan of Britain’s wretched health system, but my immediate instinct is to take the side of the NHS and make some snarky comment about personal responsibility. Perhaps, for instance, we should ask Mr. Mason whether a government official was holding a gun to his head and forcing him to eat an average of 20,000 calories every day? […]
[…] I’m not a fan of Britain’s wretched health system, but my immediate instinct is to take the side of the NHS and make some snarky comment about personal responsibility. Perhaps, for instance, we should ask Mr. Mason whether a government official was holding a gun to his head and forcing him to eat an average of 20,000 calories every day? […]
If in fact doctors and hospitals try to please whoever is paying the bills, then in the US that whould mean that by and large they would be trying to please HMOs, not patients.
If this is true, then the question ibecomes whether or not it is better for those who deliver heathcare to be trying to please HMOs or politicians.
This seems to me to be the logic here.
Britain has problems with malnutrition in its hospitals,
Britain has a goverment-run healthcare system,
therefore government-run healthcare leads to malnutrition problems in hospitals.
This conclusion would only be shown as valid if Britain’s statistics were compared to those of other countries with or without government-run healthcare.
I have been searching on the Internet, so far in vain for comparable statistics for the USA and Canada. If you or anyone else here can supply any, I would be very interested to see the results.
Based on a lifetime of using and observing the Canadian healthcare system, I have never seen or heard of anyone dying of malnutrition in a Canadian hospital. Of course, that is not in any way an objective measure.
As another anecdotal note, I have never met a single Canadian who wanted to change from a government-run healthcare system. In fact, in a recent nationwide poll, Canadians voted Tommy Douglas, known here as the Father of Medicare, as the Greatest Canadian of all time, which seems to me to be a heavy endorsement of our system of providing healthcare.
If there are any factual questions about the Canadian healthcare system that I could answer from my personal experience, I would be pleased to comment.
On a personal note, while what we have in Canada is far from perfect, as the lower income mother of a son with a chronic terminal disease, I was glad not to have to worry about how I would pay for the medical care my child needed.