Daniel Hannan has a good piece on the NHS:
The elision of the “hardworking doctors and nurses” with the state monopoly that employs them is what allows opponents of reform to shout down any criticism. People who complain are treated, not as wronged consumers, but as pests. People who argue that there might be a better way of organising the system are treated, not as proponents of a different view, but as enemies.
Any organisation that is spared criticism becomes, over time, inefficient, insensitive, intolerant. It has happened to the United Nations. It has happened to the mega-charities. It happened, for a long time, to the European Union (though not over the past five years). The more lofty the ideal, the more reluctant people are to look at the grubby reality.
We can’t let that happen here. I’m sure that many of the people behind this legislative atrocity would love to jail its critics, if they could.
Hannan wrote:
“Supporters of the NHS don’t say, “This organisation may never be criticised,” of course. What they say is, “Instead of knocking the NHS, why don’t we work together to improve it?” But, if you think about it, that’s another way of saying the same thing. The argument for change is not defeated; it is disallowed.”
Gee sounds a lot like what Baghdad Jim says ad nauseum in here….as well as that most nausea-inducing president: Dear Leader Obama.
And Hannan answers that most eloquently.
In our case (as well as NHS I suspect but cannot say authoritatively), you cannot improve something that is deeply flawed at it’s basic premises.
Gee Rand, do you think we should’ve stopped knocking NASA and instead worked to improve it?
I haven’t found NASA very receptive to changes needed to improve it. To be really fair, most of NASA’s problem is also that of DoD and they awful procurement system for large projects. But it hardly gets better when you look past that issue.
Brilliant piece by Hannan. I often wonder if people in other countries – particularly the US – understand how debate on the last refuge of communism in Europe is shut down, not least by a sort of self-censorship.
I’m facing the bare adequacy of the NHS right now, with my father, who was admitted for a minor operation a week ago. When he dropped off the end of the waiting list to have it done on Thursday, he was moved to another hospital to get it on Friday. Turns out that hospital doesn’t do the procedure in question on Fridays. (Isn’t some kind of integration the one thing you might expect a state monopoly to be good at?) It does it on Mondays. But not this Monday. So he’s being temporarily discharged over Christmas (which, this being the government, lasts until Monday).
Fortunately it is a minor procedure, and not – yet – urgent. He’ll get it done eventually, and go around telling everyone how grateful he is to have the NHS doing all this marvellous work for “free”.
The “debate” over the ACA, when Democrats talked of Republicans “opposing healthcare”, reminded me very much of that in Britain. To our political class, of all parties, “healthcare” and “NHS” are simply synonyms. Beware.