Spoonful of Sugah

Yes, it does make the medicine go down, unless you are choking on your foot. Witness how our new Medicare Czar, Dr. Donald Berwick, who was appointed on July 7th by Prez Obama, views healthcare:

“You could have had a monstrous insurance industry of claims and rules and paper-pushing instead of using your tax base to provide a single route of finance. You could have protected the wealthy and the well, instead of recognizing that sick people tend to be poorer and that poor people tend to be sicker. And that any health care funding plan that is just, equitable, civilized and humane must--must--redistribute wealth from the richer among us to the poorer and the less fortunate. Excellent health care is by definition redistributional. Britain, you chose well.”

Believe it or not, Dr. Berwick gave that speech on July 1st, to honor the 60th anniversary of the National Health Service, Britain’s government-run single-payer health care system. And in a case of delicious, sugary irony, Britain’s Coalition government is making plans to transfer sole responsibility of patient care to doctors from primary care trusts. *insert chortles here*

About £80billion will be distributed to family GPs in a move that will see strategic health authorities and primary care trusts scrapped.

The plan, contained in a white paper to be published next week, is designed to place key decisions about how patients are cared for in the hands of doctors who know them. Tens of thousands of administrative jobs in the health service will be lost as a result.

To recap: Britain is going to cut bureaucracy, and give doctors and their patients more control and say over their treatment. Doctors will be held more accountable for their decisions, as well. And here in the Land of Opportunity, our Ear Leader rushes us headlong into the same morass that Britain is desperately trying to escape. Thanks, Fifty-two-ers, may y’all be the first to get “treatment” from the Nurses Ratched, and without benefit of even a reach-around.