UK Health Official: 300-500 Weekly Deaths Due to Emergency Care Delays
9th January 2023
The UK’s health service—a source of the nation’s pride for over 75 years—is close to buckling this winter due to an ill-timed confluence of pressures. Various senior health officials are sounding the alarm while preventable deaths are skyrocketing.
Matthew Taylor, chief executive of the NHS (National Health Services) Confederation, told Sky News on January 2nd that he speaks to NHS leaders “every day and a lot of them, if not most of them, say this is the toughest winter they’ve ever dealt with,” adding his own view that they “cannot go on like this.”
How about that great comprehensive free government-provided health care? Don’t you wish we had a system like that in the U.S.? (We do. It’s called the VA. Ask veterans how that works out for them.)
January 11th, 2023 at 05:49
Anything that’s 20% of the USA’s spending is worth a comment from your reader. With “free” (government supplied) anything, there are at least two intractable issues:
1. If something is “free” how is it rationed? How is demand balanced against ability to supply the service?
2. As with any enormous institution, but more so with government, those who profit from it, employees, contractors, etc. will prioritize their own security over the organization’s stated mission. This leads to waste, inefficiency, etc.
These and probably other problems are likely unavoidable. Surely they can be managed, but how?
January 11th, 2023 at 14:15
It is the evolved function of markets to do that management. Unfortunately, politicians don’t like how reality arranges itself and they have to pee in it until it tastes better to them. Those introduced distortions screw everything up.