19 June 2018
Kristian Niemietz is quoted in the Telegraph Business
Spending billions of pounds is cool again. After eight years of attempts to restrain growth in spending, the Government has turned the taps back on. The National Health Service is to get an extra £20bn per year.
The exact source of the funds has yet to be determined. There has been some talk of a “Brexit dividend”, although extra taxes and borrowing will be needed as well.
It coincides with the NHS’s 70th birthday so the giveaway has been offered as something of a present to the UK’s favoured septuagenarian.
Yet as anyone who is still working after 70 years can attest, many of the ways they worked in their youth are no longer applicable now.
Kristian Niemietz of the Institute of Economic Affairs is an advocate of a mandatory social insurance system.
“I suggest adopting that kind of system wholesale – you would pay your insurance company directly. If you can’t afford it, the government tops it up,” says Niemietz.
His studies of countries including the Netherlands and Switzerland suggest these systems typically have better health outcomes, with higher cancer and stroke survival rates than the UK. He favours a system with mandatory insurance but user choice over the precise package – for instance, an unlimited policy with access to any healthcare provider, or a cheaper version where the customer still registers with a GP who controls access to care. However he acknowledges it may be hard to achieve unless there is “a major shift of opinion” among voters.
Read the full article here.
Further IEA Reading: Universal healthcare without the NHS
The exact source of the funds has yet to be determined. There has been some talk of a “Brexit dividend”, although extra taxes and borrowing will be needed as well.
It coincides with the NHS’s 70th birthday so the giveaway has been offered as something of a present to the UK’s favoured septuagenarian.
Yet as anyone who is still working after 70 years can attest, many of the ways they worked in their youth are no longer applicable now.
Kristian Niemietz of the Institute of Economic Affairs is an advocate of a mandatory social insurance system.
“I suggest adopting that kind of system wholesale – you would pay your insurance company directly. If you can’t afford it, the government tops it up,” says Niemietz.
His studies of countries including the Netherlands and Switzerland suggest these systems typically have better health outcomes, with higher cancer and stroke survival rates than the UK. He favours a system with mandatory insurance but user choice over the precise package – for instance, an unlimited policy with access to any healthcare provider, or a cheaper version where the customer still registers with a GP who controls access to care. However he acknowledges it may be hard to achieve unless there is “a major shift of opinion” among voters.
Read the full article here.
Further IEA Reading: Universal healthcare without the NHS
1 thought on “What can the NHS learn from the world?”
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Economic Theory
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Media Coverage
When he was in office, Lord Darzi proposed ‘polyclinics’ to take medical access out of the hospitals and into the community. I think the GPs thought it would be staffed by them but it makes more sense to staff it with specialists. It didn’t receive enough support.
I worked in Urology where most of our clinic activity was outpatient and day case surgery. A proposal at the time was to train”office urologists” who would undertake this work leaving the”surgical urologists” to cover emergency and major surgery. This model could work under Darzi’s scheme and give direct access to the specialty.
Again, at the time, a frequent occurrence in the clinic would be releasing need of their prostate cancer diagnosis and being told that their request for aPSA blood test had been refused a few years earlier. They had represented when symptoms had started. Fortunately this is rare nowadays. I am sure that if they had presented to a specialist at the beginning their PSA would have been done.