Elite NHS foundation trusts are gearing up to lure private patients from home and abroad as health budgets are squeezed – a decision made possible after health secretary Andrew Lansley said he would abolish the cap limiting the proportion of total income hospitals can earn from the paying sick…
With a £20bn black hole opening up in NHS budgets, a group of top performing trusts are seeking to profit from paying patients and use the money to fund public healthcare in Britain.
Previously,
Labour's cap had meant most hospitals were unable to generate more than 2% from private income.
Here is more, although full details are not yet clear, it seems doctors will be much more in charge, in a decentralized manner. Here's one opinion:
"What's to stop US healthcare companies coming over here to poach patients. Or GPs sending patients to India for cheap operations? Or English hospitals raiding Scotland for sick people?" said Alan Maynard, professor of health economics at the University of York. "It could be a real mess."
How long will it be before the entire NHS, as it was known, goes down as a collapsed model? What exactly caused the collapse? (I was surprised to read that Labour had tripled the budget since 1997.) Will "the line" be that evil ideologues are dismantling a working system? How will greater competition for patients alter our assessments of various national health care systems? Is empowering doctors going to cut costs? How much loyalty will patients, and voters, show to the old NHS model?
I don’t really understand professor Maynard’s comments. People can already pay to go to the US and get private healthcare. If US firms set up shop in the UK and take in private patients, doesn’t that just relieve the NHS of costly patients? What is to stop GPs sending people to India for cheap operations, indeed. I don’t see what that has to do with UK hospitals doing more private work.
Isn’t the big question whether NHS hospitals raising revenue by doing more private business will cause deterioration in the quality of care given to poor NHS patients who cannot afford to go private? I expect most Brits would say yes, regarding the supply of doctors & nurses as fixed, but it’s not obvious this move won’t actually make more resources available if the private cross-subsidize the NHS patients.
“Here is more, although full details are not yet clear, it seems doctors will be much more in charge, in a decentralized manner.”
Am I missing something? The NHS seeks to lower costs by empowering doctors???!!! That hasn’t exactly worked in the US.
‘…goes down as a collapsed model?’
I seem to remember reading in American reports that it was a collapsed model back in the 1970s. Or was that the 1980s? Or maybe the 1990s?
They could double what they pay per capita and they’d still be paying less then we do in the US.
I’d like to have their problems in stead of ours, at the moment at least.
“What’s to stop US healthcare companies coming over here to poach patients. Or GPs sending patients to India for cheap operations? Or English hospitals raiding Scotland for sick people?” said Alan Maynard, professor of health economics at the University of York. “It could be a real mess.”
Why does this quote from a British health economist sound like a pile of smelly misconception?
Suppose you are a community of medical professionals and you want to maximize your “catch” from a population of patients. What is the best way to do this? Taking a line from fishery management, the most economical way to do this is to establish property rights over which patients can be treated by which groups of medical professionals. These rights should of course be transferable, so that each patient ends up the group who can make the largest profit on them.
Looks like Labour should have quadrupled the budget, then there wouldn’t be that 20 billion pound hole. Problem solved.
You are right Derek and it’s going to get worse unless we do something. I’m not convinced Obamacare is the answer but we might have to find out.
>That 6 month claim is wrong, unless you’re talking about a non-critical treatment.
Not at all. Two individuals I know waited that long. One survived, the other didn’t. I suppose for the one who survived it was non-critical.
The Canadian system is different in every province, and after every provincial budget. Sometimes there is lots of money, or a focus on some specific medical need that caught the politician’s eye due to neglect.
Collapse or near collapse comes from misallocation or inability to plan or fund future needs. Decisions take 5-10 years to come to fruition, so situations such as the early 90′s where budgetary pressures cut spending on training of doctors and nurses create a near collapse situation a decade later where doctors in Quebec are ordered to show up at emergency wards or lose their billing numbers.
Not to say that any system can plan perfectly, simply that the lack of resources force the system to live on the edge. The US system is anything but brittle, whereas the government run systems have no excess capacity. The US system could double the average service time for many procedures without most people really noticing, but the Canadian system is at the point in many cases where patients in need save money by paying for procedures as opposed to being incapacitated until the government system gets around to treating you.
Derek
Robin Hanson tells us that more healthcare spending doesn’t make people healthier and may often be harmful. The NHS is regarded as among the most miserly of rich countries, but does not have worse health outcomes. So I conclude it is the best and change will likely make it worse.
I’m sure the NHS will fall apart just like the Euro. Oh wait…
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