Health Care 101 Continued: The allocation problem

We often hear sentiments to the effect that human life is infinitely precious, that you can ' t put a price on human life. While most people probably think this instinctively, it is conservatives, and particularly religious conservatives, who are most likely to try to apply the concept in reality. Do you remember the ravings about " death panels " when the Affordable Care Act passed? Of course there ' s nothing in the ACA that could conceivably be construed that way, but the scary meme was imported from arguments about single payer or, as in the UK, socialized medicine schemes.To put this in the simplest and starkest terms, let ' s consider Britain, that totalitarian dungeon. In the UK, the government owns and operates an entire health care system that serves the entire population, called the National Health Service. Physicians, nurses, technicians, hospital staff, everybody who works in the system, are government employees. If you want to, you are free to pay for services from private providers, but obviously you have to be able to afford it.This means that every year, Parliament has to put up the money to fund the NHS, and that sum is necessarily finite. Under Tory rule, it ' s been less than enough for the NHS to provide generally satisfactory services, but even under a more liberal government it would obviously have to be a specific number. Necessarily, therefore, there is a body called the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (abbreviated NICE because of its...
Source: Stayin' Alive - Category: American Health Source Type: blogs