Wednesday, April 10, 2013

The new NHS...

David Lock: A new and very different type of NHS in England - short blog entry/article well worth reading.



http://blogs.bmj.com/bmj/2013/04/02/david-lock-a-new-and-very-different-type-of-nhs-in-england/?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=7529&utm_content=BMJ%20-%20What%27s%20New%20Online&utm_term=David%20Lock%3A%20A%20new%20and%20very%20different%20type%20of%20NHS%20in%20England&utm_source=Adestra_BMJ

'There are a multitude of voices to explain why the marketisation of the NHS will be a disaster, and they are almost certainly right. But – I say with my tongue firmly in my cheek – there is a silver lining to every cloud. It will be a bonanza for lawyers. Every contract will be crawled over by lawyers, disputes will be far more common, and m’learned friends will be fully engaged and well rewarded. But all this comes at a cost. The NHS has traditionally spent about 6% of its annual spend on administrating the system. A market system, such as in the US, spends vastly more. A study by Harvard Medical School and the Canadian Institute for Health Information determined that some 31% of US healthcare dollars went to healthcare administrative costs, nearly double the administrative overhead in Canada, on a percentage basis and vastly more than the NHS’s paltry 6%.'