John Hinderaker: This is life under government medicine–a shell game in which the paramount objective is not treatment of patients, but perpetuation of a bureaucracy.
Coming soon to the United States. Here is what progressives can’t seem to understand:
Britain’s National Health Service has taken a lot of heat because patients often wait a year or more for operations, and many die in the meantime. The NHS could have responded to this criticism by making its operations more efficient so that waiting times could be reduced, like a private company would, for fear of losing business to competitors. But in government medicine, such incentives are lacking. So the NHS did the next best thing: it started rotating people out of the hospital prematurely to make room for new patients, thereby reducing the new patients’ waiting time, but increasing the likelihood that the prior round of patients would need to return.
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But when you live in an environment where corporations are evil and government has the answers to all the problems, you have a giant blind spot. Boulderites have this giant blind spot and the local newspaper has an even larger one.
