Most of us already knew that Michael Moore is a liar. But we didn’t know that he’d make the mistake of going to the UK so he could show how their National Health System is the sort of thing we’d want to emulate. Minette Marrin in The Sunday Times (UK) tells about it in Quack Michael Moore has mad view of the NHS. She doesn’t hold back in describing their system:
This, along with an even rosier portrait of the French welfare system, is what Moore says the state can and should provide. You would never guess from Sicko that the NHS is in deep trouble, mired in scandal and incompetence, despite the injection of billions of pounds of taxpayers’ money.
While there are good doctors and nurses and treatments in the NHS, there is so much that is inadequate or bad that it is dishonest to represent it as the envy of the world and a perfect blueprint for national healthcare. It isn’t.
GPs’ salaries – used by Moore as evidence that a state-run system does not necessarily mean low wages – is highly controversial; their huge pay rise has coincided with a loss of home visits, a serious problem in getting GP appointments and continuing very low pay for nurses and cleaners.
At least 20 NHS trusts have even worse problems with the hospital-acquired infection clostridium difficile, not least the trust in Kent where 90 people died of C diff in a scandal reported recently.
Many hospitals are in crisis. Money shortages, bad management, excesses of bureaucrats and deadly Whitehall micromanagement mean they have to skimp on what matters most.
Overfilling the beds is dangerous to patients, in hygiene and in recovery times, but it goes on widely. Millions are wasted on expensive agency nurses because NHS nurses are abandoning the profession in droves. Only days ago, the 2007 nurse of the year publicly resigned in despair at the health service. There is a dangerous shortage of midwives since so many have left, and giving birth on the NHS can be a shocking experience.
Meanwhile thousands of young hospital doctors, under a daft new employment scheme, were sent randomly around the country, pretty much regardless of their qualifications or wishes. As foreign doctors are recruited from Third World countries, hundreds of the best-qualified British doctors have been left unemployed. Several have emigrated.
As for consultants, the men in Whitehall didn’t believe what they said about the hours they worked, beyond their duties, and issued new contracts forcing them to work less. You could hardly make it up.
Nothing surprising there, though we can be sure it won’t stop the U.S. left wing from trying to reproduce those results in our country.
And what does Marrin herself think should be done?
None of these problems mean we should abandon the idea of a universal shared system of healthcare. It’s clear we would not want the American model, even if it isn’t quite as bad as portrayed by Moore. It’s clear our British private medical insurance provision is a rip-off. I believe we should as a society share burdens of ill health and its treatment. The only question is how best to do that and it seems to me the state-run, micromanaged NHS has failed to answer it.
OK, I can understand why she doesn’t want to exchange their system for ours. The people pushing nationalized health care may be in deep denial, but so are those who try to ignore the problems with our own health care, for example, those who say nobody is denied health care in our country — all you need to do is go to the emergency room, etc etc.
But where is the discussion about what should be done to fix the problems with existing national health care systems? All I ever hear is “the government should provide this, the government should provide that,” without talking about what it would take for the government to actually do that. There is no talk about the moral hazard issues. Marrin points out that the NHS has failed to answer the question of how best to provide universal care. Well, where does one go to find an intelligent discussion of how to fix it? All we get is a wish list of how life in fantasyland ought to be.
If I ever hear of any good discussions on the topic, I’ll be sure to blog about it here.