Putting Things in Perspective
The U.S. healthcare system takes no shortage of criticism. Often, these criticisms fall into two camps. There are those of us who believe that the United States has one of the strongest, most innovative health systems in the world, but we need delivery and payment reforms to increase value as well as insurance reforms and subsidies to strengthen accessibility. There are others who see the U.S. ranking well below dozens of other countries’ health systems and that we’re inherently condemned to this inferiority unless we begin taking steps to model ourselves after the government-run systems of Europe.
As we consider these two views, it’s good to get a little perspective. That perspective is brought to us from the Times of London.
The Times recently reported an appalling instance. Cost-cutting to meet government budget requirements took priority over providing hospital patients even basic, decent care. Doctors and nurses “stopped providing safe care because they were preoccupied with government targets and cutting costs.” This negligence and maltreatment led to the deaths of between 400 and 1,200 patients at this one hospital alone between 2005 and 2008.
What did British hospital patients face? They “went unwashed for weeks, were left without food or drink and were even unable to get to the lavatory. Some [patients] lay in soiled sheets that relatives had to take home to wash, others developed infections or had falls, occasionally fatal.”
The daughter of one of the hospital’s victims has founded a grassroots group that serves as a watchdog over the British health bureaucracy. “It is time that the public were told the truth about the very large number of excess deaths in NHS (National Health Service) care and the very large number of avoidable but deadly errors that occur every day,” Cure the NHS’s founder Julie Bailey said.
Don’t get me wrong. We need to be concerned in our own country whenever there are systemic errors that threaten patient safety and diminish quality. But it’s important to note that the kind of gross neglect that British patients bear up under is quite rare in the United States. The difference here is that most Americans enjoy the benefits of private healthcare. Even those in a government health program like Medicare or Medicaid share the blessings of the private health sector’s significant role in U.S. healthcare.
Again, our system has flaws that need fixing, but let’s make sure we keep this discussion in perspective.
