Example UK – “The Failures of Medicine Without Markets”

Not that could not happen in, say, NY City. But government dominated healthcare/"medicare for all" is no panacea. This from the Wall Street Journal.

Americans dissatisfied with the medical system created by ObamaCare might want to take a moment to inspect a health system where market discipline has not just been suppressed and distorted but eliminated entirely. No, this column is not about the deprivation and suffering in Marxist regimes like Cuba or Venezuela. Even in a society as wealthy as the U.K., dysfunctional government-run medicine has lately produced a debate on how best to provide treatment in hospital hallways when there are no rooms available for patients.

Ben Spencer reports for The Sunday Times on one patient’s recent experience:

As soon as Patricia Sillitoe fell, she knew she was in trouble. But she did not realise it would be 23 hours until she would finally get into a hospital bed.

It was 2am last Saturday when the 90-year-old fell on the bathroom floor, in her home in Carshalton, south London. Unable to stand, she slowly crawled to the bedroom “then flicked the light on and off hoping that my neighbour would see it”. Fortunately her friend is an early riser — at 6am she spotted Sillitoe’s signal, let herself in with the spare key and dialled 999.

After a four-hour wait for the ambulance, the widowed grandmother was taken to nearby St Helier Hospital… When she finally got a bed, more than 14 hours after she arrived, every bay was full. With dozens of other patients, she was wheeled into the corridor.

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Alex Croft recently reported in the U.K.’s Independent:

Top emergency doctors have criticised a new guide on how to treat patients in corridors, warning it is “normalising the dangerous”.

New guidance produced by NHS England in September on how to provide “safe and good quality care” in “temporary” spaces.

The Royal College of Emergency Medicine (RCEM) has denounced the guide as “nonsensical” and “out of touch”, saying that it is “not possible to provide safe and good quality care” in corridors and cupboards in a new position statement.

While acknowledging that corridor care is “not acceptable”, the guidance says hospitals are having to use temporary spaces more regularly – and use is no longer “in extremis”. It advises staff on how they can deliver the “safest, most effective and highest quality care possible” in such circumstances.

Aiming to provide the highest quality of unacceptable care? Patients deserve better than government-run medicine, and the road to reform is to move toward more market discipline, more price signals, more customer-driven care and yes, more profit-driven competition.