A brief thought on health systems

[andrewducker]

I am not wedded to the idea of a single-provider healthcare system (as the NHS currently is), or to the idea that the NHS should provide all of its care by employing people, rather than acting as a centralised system for buying healthcare (and ensuring that it is of high quality). France has a system of compulsory health insurance mixed with voluntary health insurance, with a mix of public, private and voluntary hospitals and organisations providing the actual service - and it is apparently the best in the world.

I _am_ wedded to a system that doesn't let people die (or leave them in chronic pain/disabled) because they don't have the money to pay for care. And thus I am in favour of socialised healthcare, of one form of another.

And I am also in favour of a system that's coherent, and structured for the long term.

Which is why I'm not really fussed about what direction the NHS is dragged in - so long as it is one that has some evidence behind it, and one that subsequent governments aren't going to instantly reverse. There's no point party A making a set of changes if party B are going to change everything back as soon as they gain power.

I just can't think of a way of making all of the major parties sit down, look at the evidence of what makes a system work well, and hammer out something that they can all live with. Certainly not under the current system where the party not in power sees its job as opposition, and the party in power sees its job as dragging things as far as they can in their ideological direction so that bits of their policies stick even if most of them are reversed.

Comments

[matgb]

This.

Question for you--if I want to link to a post of yours, what's your preferred locale, LJ or DW? I obviously prefer DW, but you get more comments on LJ (partially due to your crosspost text, but I don't know a good way of wording that, merely a set of less awful ways).

[philmophlegm.livejournal.com]

I pretty much agree with you. In this country, we have a difference between what people really want and what they actually demand. What most people really want is healthcare that everyone can easily afford. But what they demand is that this MUST be provided by THE STATE in the form of one massive centralised bureaucracy. Anything else is EVIL PRIVATISATION of the glorious NHS.

Just a thought - if we didn't have a National Health Service, but simply some kind of insurance system with private hospitals, then we wouldn't need to get politicians involved in this at all.

[danieldwilliam.livejournal.com]

I often think of the current political set up as an arch. Two large, heavy organisations pushing sideways against each other with great force in order to not move things very much.