Britain's Health Care: So Bad, Doctors Don't Even Want To Practice There
01/05/2016 05:34 PM ET
Health Care: Angry over pay and working conditions, British doctors are threatening to go on strike next week. This is the sort of disaster that can happen only when physicians are government employees.
As many as 37,000 "junior doctors, or doctors in training who represent just over half of all doctors in the National Health Service," Reuters reports, have said "they would stage a 24-hour stoppage next week, followed by two further 48-hour strikes."
A walkout of disgruntled doctors, the first in Great Britain since 1975, would affect nonemergency care and cause surgeries to be canceled, leaving many Brits, who rely on government health care, to go untreated.
Of course, going without treatment is already part of the British health care experience. The National Health Service is a broken system in need of an overhaul. It can't continue as is.
The threatened strike is one of many signs that foundational change is needed, but doctor dissatisfaction is not new to the National Health Service. Britain's resource-challenged socialized medicine has been chasing away doctors for years.
A little more than three years ago, the Financial Times reported, "(The) National Health Service is suffering a 'brain drain' of doctors as more medics trained at taxpayers' expense choose to pursue their careers overseas."
From 2008 to 2012, more than 8,000 doctors left Britain. The Financial Times said that they had grown tired of working "extensive 'goodwill hours' and coming in on days off." Younger doctors were feeling they had been "abused by the long hours" they put in.
Actually, the physician flight is almost as old as the system itself. A 1964 study, "British Doctors at Home and Abroad," found that as soon as the early 1950s, less than a decade after the NHS was established in a postwar socialism binge, physicians were quitting for nations where they could earn higher salaries and take on a "wider field of work."
And it continues today. In September, the Express reported, "Junior doctors across Britain are queuing up to work abroad after the government announced draconian plans to change their contracts."
As a result of the doctor brain drain, Britain has been left little choice but to import foreign doctors to fill the gaps. The Daily Mail says that 35.4% of all British doctors were born outside the U.K. Only Luxembourg has a higher rate of foreign-born doctors in the European Union.
It's not just the job that's causing doctors to look for a way out, either. Britain's health care professionals have also become disillusioned by the government's poor standard of care. (Let's be blunt: Part of the problem is the lower quality of treatment provided by the Third World doctors the system has had to recruit.)
Conditions have become so deficient that, the Daily Mail reported in 2013, 37% of Britain's National Health Service workers — doctors, nurses, paramedics — told a survey that they would not recommend their own workplace to friends or family who need care.
These problems are unique to systems in which government controls and doles out health care. Educated, professional providers are simply cogs in the bureaucratic machine in which limited resources are expected to cover unlimited demand.
Doctors learn, some faster than others, that in Britain the rewards of their profession are sorely lacking.
The only solution is to scrap the state-run mess and replace it with a privately run system. Defenders of the status quo will howl in protest that it will never work. But privatization flourishes in every industrial and economic sector in which it is allowed to operate freely.
Besides, the British really can't have anything worse than they already have.
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