Insurers to reform themsevles…

Well, while you may have been lucky enough to get better under the NHS, Anna, lots of people don’t.  The US has a higher survival rate for pretty much every potentially fatal disease than the UK—certainly for every single cancer.  You’re writing about science here, so come on: you know that anecdotal evidence doesn’t count.  Pick a thousand people and see how many of them survive.  That’s the important data.

I might add that, if you have such a positive view of the NHS, I bet you didn’t require the sort of specialist treatment that comes with a waiting list.  Need an MRI scan?  We can give you one in 6 months.  And that’s not treatment; that’s just diagnosis. 

In the US, because MRI scanners cost a fortune and the hospitals that pay that money want to make it back ASAP, your hospitals run the scanners 24 hours a day.  In the UK, there is simply no link between the people spending the money and the people providing the money, so that incentive doesn’t exist.  So MRI scanners are run between 9 and 5, Monday to Friday, and patients have to wait months for a scan.  The reason I mention this example is that it shows how the waiting list is caused not by a lack of money or other resources, but simply by a lack of a particular incentive.  That incentive is exactly what gets removed when you introduce state funding.

I think it’s very sad to see the US going down this route.  There seems to be a naive belief amongst Americans that you can keep exactly the same quality and type of healthcare but just hand the bill to the state.  It doesn’t work that way.  Once the state are footing the bill, Gammon’s Law kicks in: as input increases, output decreases, for any reasonable measures of input and output.

I also don’t think political beliefs are an excuse for committing trespass and theft.

We’ve disagreed on this point before, Mr. Squander. But I think you raise very important points about the ramifications of state-funded health care. You see it everywhere - the lines, the waiting, the lesser access to v. high cost treatments. The California proposal above, however, is just to get everyone insured..and this is still mostly by private companies.

Yes, the UK has the lowest cancer survival rate in Europe among original members according to a recent Lancet Oncology article...and the US was higher than the overall European average for all the solid tumors. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6W85-4PG8HCV-2&_user=10&_rdoc=1&_fmt=&_orig=search&_sort=d&view=c&_acct=C000050221&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=10&md5=d34ee36a456447bd4cf648537642ac00
US survival was 63% for women and 66% for men - the European average was just 47% for men and 56% for women.

But some European countries - Belgium, Austria, Sweden - came pretty close. And of course, they are publicly funded health care systems and spend around half per capita on health care compared to the US does. I hope you enjoy your healthy state of bankruptcy! Health bills are still the number one cause of bankruptcy in the US.
http://www.consumeraffairs.com/news04/2005/bankruptcy_study.html

And what about the fact that Canada, a single payer system, long lines and all, has an overall cancer survival very similar to the US (58% men; 62% women for data 4 years older than the Lancet study above)
http://www.cancer.ca/ccs/internet/standard/0,3182,3172_14279__langId-en,00.html

And then we have another recent Lancet study which found that the incidence of many diseases is lower in the UK than the US, including heart attacks, cancer, diabetes. http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/story/0,,1766314,00.html
Which one is a better reflection of the effectiveness of a health system? Probably a bit of both.

The US system surely has its boons, but pretty much everyone outside and inside the country agree that system is not ideal. Neither is single-payer public health care. I don’t think you can assume a certain quality of care just based on the public/private divide.

Stealing political signs? Are you actually proud that you go around stifling the voices of those with whom you disagree? Bloggers who don’t seem to respect freedom of expression are a perplexing lot.