It Will Not Work!

 

 

Stanley Feld M.D.,FACP, MACE

“The media is the message.” It does not matter if the policy has failed previously.  All that is important is the effectiveness of the policy’s presentation and its ability to manipulate the polls. 

The government’s purpose is to work for the people who elected it. It does not seem to be working that way at present. Bureaucrats create rules or regulations as they interpret the laws made by congress and the president. Regulations are controlled by the administration’s ideology. Many times the regulations in one area nullify the intended effect in another area.  

Regulations and bureaucracy inhibit the use of common sense in policy making for the benefit of the people.

The people did not have an outlet to express their opinions or frustrations until blogging came into its own seven years ago.  

Americans do not like President Obama’s healthcare reform act. They also do not like Dr. Don Berwick’s apparent disrespect for their intelligence and his infatuation with the British healthcare system.

“I am romantic about the NHS (British National Health Service); I love it. All I need to do to rediscover the romance is to look at health care in my own country.”

 Dr. Berwick’s comments about redistribution of wealth and taking freedom of choice is scorned by many Americans.
 

“Dr. Berwick complained the American health system runs in the ‘darkness of private enterprise,’ unlike Britain’s ‘politically accountable system.’ The NHS is ‘universal, accessible, excellent, and free at the point of care – a health system that is, at its core, like the world we wish we had: generous, hopeful, confident, joyous, and just’; America’s health system is ‘toxic,’ ‘fragmented,’ because of its dependence on consumer choice. He told his UK audience: ‘I cannot believe that the individual health care consumer can enforce through choice the proper configurations of a system as massive and complex as health care. That is for leaders to do.’”

The NHS is failing. Prime Minister Cameron has declared he will change the system. The British healthcare system has resulted in long waits for treatment and rationing of treatment.  If past experience is any indication, generic drugs and expert commissions have done little to lower healthcare costs.

“As the United States prepares to introduce the massive new health-care program known as Obamacare, Britain’s Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron said on Monday that he plans to significantly reform his country’s state-run health-care system due to the program’s massive cost and lackluster performance”. 

Theodore Dalrymple wrote a critique of the British Healthcare system in the Wall Street Journal on April 16, 2011. Theodore Dalrymple is the pen name of  Anthony Daniels, an English physician.  

He is echoing the sentiments of many practicing physicians in Britain.

Dr. Anthony Daniels’ perception contradicts Dr. Don Berwick’s perception. One of them is wrong.  My bet is Dr. Berwick is wrong. 

Dr. Daniels’ practical experiences are:

“1. All attempts to reduce bureaucracy increase it, and the same goes for cost. Such, at any rate, has been my experience of the British health care system.”

“2. In Britain we have been prescribing generics for years; I cannot remember a time when I personally did not. Our National Institute for Clinical Excellence (NICE) has done cost-benefit analyses of drugs and procedures, often very sensibly, for years. But despite its best efforts, our system has been highly inventive in finding other ways of wasting immense quantities of public money.”

I suspect this is a result of the administrative costs associated with the increased government bureaucracy and regulations.

“3. Don Berwick wants to move from a fee-for-service system, which gives doctors an incentive to perform expensive and doubtfully effective procedures, to one in which doctors are rewarded for preventing diseases that are so expensive to treat.”

“4. On paper, prevention always seems much cheaper than cure. Health-care economists prove it very elegantly and convincingly over and over again.”

“5. Unfortunately, the world always proves to be more complex and refractory than the theories of even the best economists”.

“6. For a long time, a physician was paid a capitation fee: He received a certain amount per patient per year from the NHS, irrespective of what the doctor did for the patient or how many times a year the patient was seen.  The physician could not increase his income except by private practice.”

“7. Needless to say, private practice was most extensive in the better-off areas, so that the system ended up reproducing the very social divisions in health care that it was designed to abolish.”

“8. In the poorer areas, doctors had no incentive—at any rate, no financial incentive—to improve their practice. It was rather the reverse. The worse the facilities they offered, the higher their income.”

“9. In the 1990s, Family doctors began to be paid to undertake preventive measures. The experts hoped that this would save money because the cost of preventing diseases would be more than offset by the savings from not having to treat the diseases that they prevented.”

“The costs of prevention were decidedly real, while the savings were inclined to be imaginary.”

a.     “The bureaucratic costs of setting and monitoring health-improvement targets—which were often highly arbitrary—were far greater than anticipated, bureaucracies having an inherent tendency to increase in size and spending power.”

b.    “Many doctors started to be paid for procedures that they were already doing for no charge, like taking their patients' blood pressure.”

c.     “Screening procedures turned out to be highly equivocal in their efficacy.”

d.     “Thus the overall benefit was much less than anticipated.”

e.     “Some of the more common ills that had been targeted, such as strokes and heart attacks, were in marked decline anyway because of increase in effective technology.”

f.      “Worse, much of the expenditure on the treatment of disease proved intractable.”

g.     “Technology inexorably increased costs; and even if the health of the population improved rapidly”

h.     “The increased proportion of older people in the population meant that the proportion of people ill with expensive chronic diseases increased.”

i.      “Procedures such as hip replacement have gone from being relatively new-fangled and exotic to being routine, precisely at a time when there are more people than ever who can benefit from them.”

j.      “ Osteoarthritis is no doubt hastened by obesity, but no medical means has yet been found for the prevention of that particular condition.”

“It is true that in Britain we have had our own peculiar reasons for the spectacular rise in the cost of our health-care system.”

“The British system is now capable of absorbing infinite amounts of money with minimal benefit to the health of the population, though with great benefit to the pocketbooks of those who work in it.”

“It is an occupational hazard for politicians to think that they and their ilk know best.”

“I have seen a hundred schemes of cost reduction.”

“ I have never seen any reduction in costs, or at least any that lasted more than a few months. I can't remember a single health minister who did not promise more efficiency at less cost, or a single one who actually managed to achieve it.”

“The long-term solution, I imagine, is the same for health care as it is for pensions: to pay for it with the income generated by dedicated savings accounts, which can be transferred to the next generation after death.”  

President Obama is setting up a healthcare system in America that has been proven not to work in Britain. The healthcare reform act should be reconsidered.

  The opinions expressed in the blog “Repairing The Healthcare System” are, mine and mine alone