Op-Ed

The Flu Is Grinding Down British Healthcare To A Halt

Sally Pipes Sally C. Pipes is President and CEO of the Pacific Research Institute. Her latest book is “The Top Ten Myths of American Health Care: A Citizen’s Guide” Follow her on Twitter @sallypipes.
Font Size:

British health officials are in crisis mode.

They just ordered all hospitals to cancel non-urgent surgeries through the end of January — an estimated 55,000 procedures.  At least 20 hospitals have declared that they are unable to adequately care for patients and warned that “safety may be compromised.”

The cause of this panic? Nothing more than the common flu.

The United Kingdom’s government-run, single-payer healthcare system is so inept that something as mundane as flu season can cause a national crisis. Yet, single-payer is exactly what progressive activists all over the United States want to install here.

Founded in 1948, Britain’s National Health Service is falling apart. British patients face 12-hour treatment delays at some of the nation’s hospitals — even though the NHS has canceled tens of thousands of surgeries. One emergency-department doctor recently apologized for “third-world conditions” at his NHS facility.

During the holiday season, nearly 17,000 patients were left sitting in ambulances for a half-hour or more before being brought into an emergency department. An NHS memo leaked earlier in January revealed plans by a major cancer hospital to delay chemotherapy treatments for some patients or reduce the amount of medicine administered. That policy is an attempt to deal with a massive shortage of nurses.

The human costs of the NHS’ blundering are tragic. One Portsmouth resident, 88-year-old Josephine Smalley, died on New Year’s Day after spending five hours in an ambulance and another two waiting on a gurney at Queen Alexandra Hospital.

The next day, an 81-year-old Essex woman called paramedics complaining of chest pain. By the time the ambulance arrived — nearly four hours later — she was dead.

Dr. Nick Scriven of Britain’s Society for Acute Medicine told The Telegraph, “The position at the moment is as bad as I’ve ever known . . . we were at full capacity before the sorts of pressures that we should be able to manage — like a rise in flu — is pushing us over the edge.”

The United States is also experiencing an unusually severe flu season. But, it hasn’t derailed the operation of our healthcare system.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report that flu is prevalent in 46 states.  In Arizona, cases are up 758 percent compared to last year. San Diego County has seen flu cases rise eightfold from last year.

Yet this spike in flu cases hasn’t disrupted hip replacements or heart surgeries. American patients haven’t died awaiting ambulances. Nor have they languished on gurneys in hospital hallways.

That’s because America’s private-sector health system doesn’t suffer from the bureaucratic inefficiencies inherent to Britain’s single-payer system. When healthcare resources are delivered via a centrally controlled government program like the NHS, chronic shortages, overcrowding, rationing, and delays are the inevitable result.

Defenders of the British single-payer system are quick to blame the agency’s distress on a lack of funding. But the NHS actually has a bigger budget today than at any time in its history. The agency spends almost $3,000 per Briton. Health spending as a percentage of the British economy has risen from 4.7 percent in 1997 to 7.6 percent in 2015.

Without a competitive market system — one that uses price signals to distribute resources efficiently — even the most generous levels of funding would be hopelessly mismanaged.

Increasingly, Britons are trying to inject a bit more market discipline into their healthcare system. About 10 percent of the population carries private health insurance to cover things the NHS doesn’t, or to secure care in a timelier fashion than the public system allows.

American health care is hardly perfect. But enough market forces are at work to ensure that a spike in a seasonal illness doesn’t grind the entire system to a halt.

That would change if progressives import single-payer to the United States. Sen. Bernie Sanders plans to host an online town hall later in January to tout the supposed benefits of single-payer. He has already convinced one-third of his Senate Democrats to back a bill that would outlaw private insurance and implement single-payer nationwide.

The flu can be nasty, but most patients recover after a few days. But, for nations stricken by single-payer fever, the prognosis often proves terminal.

Sally C. Pipes is President, CEO, and Thomas W. Smith Fellow in Health Care Policy at the Pacific Research Institute. Her next book, The False Promise of Single-Payer Health Care (Encounter), will be published this spring. Follow her on Twitter @sallypipes.

 


The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of The Daily Caller.

PREMIUM ARTICLE: Subscribe To Keep Reading

Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!

Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!
Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!

Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!
Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!

Sign Up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!
Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!
Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!
BENEFITS READERS PASS PATRIOTS FOUNDERS
Daily and Breaking Newsletters
Daily Caller Shows
Ad Free Experience
Exclusive Articles
Custom Newsletters
Editor Daily Rundown
Behind The Scenes Coverage
Award Winning Documentaries
Patriot War Room
Patriot Live Chat
Exclusive Events
Gold Membership Card
Tucker Mug

What does Founders Club include?

Tucker Mug and Membership Card
Founders

Readers,

Instead of sucking up to the political and corporate powers that dominate America, The Daily Caller is fighting for you — our readers. We humbly ask you to consider joining us in this fight.

Now that millions of readers are rejecting the increasingly biased and even corrupt corporate media and joining us daily, there are powerful forces lined up to stop us: the old guard of the news media hopes to marginalize us; the big corporate ad agencies want to deprive us of revenue and put us out of business; senators threaten to have our reporters arrested for asking simple questions; the big tech platforms want to limit our ability to communicate with you; and the political party establishments feel threatened by our independence.

We don't complain -- we can't stand complainers -- but we do call it how we see it. We have a fight on our hands, and it's intense. We need your help to smash through the big tech, big media and big government blockade.

We're the insurgent outsiders for a reason: our deep-dive investigations hold the powerful to account. Our original videos undermine their narratives on a daily basis. Even our insistence on having fun infuriates them -- because we won’t bend the knee to political correctness.

One reason we stand apart is because we are not afraid to say we love America. We love her with every fiber of our being, and we think she's worth saving from today’s craziness.

Help us save her.

A second reason we stand out is the sheer number of honest responsible reporters we have helped train. We have trained so many solid reporters that they now hold prominent positions at publications across the political spectrum. Hear a rare reasonable voice at a place like CNN? There’s a good chance they were trained at Daily Caller. Same goes for the numerous Daily Caller alumni dominating the news coverage at outlets such as Fox News, Newsmax, Daily Wire and many others.

Simply put, America needs solid reporters fighting to tell the truth or we will never have honest elections or a fair system. We are working tirelessly to make that happen and we are making a difference.

Since 2010, The Daily Caller has grown immensely. We're in the halls of Congress. We're in the Oval Office. And we're in up to 20 million homes every single month. That's 20 million Americans like you who are impossible to ignore.

We can overcome the forces lined up against all of us. This is an important mission but we can’t do it unless you — the everyday Americans forgotten by the establishment — have our back.

Please consider becoming a Daily Caller Patriot today, and help us keep doing work that holds politicians, corporations and other leaders accountable. Help us thumb our noses at political correctness. Help us train a new generation of news reporters who will actually tell the truth. And help us remind Americans everywhere that there are millions of us who remain clear-eyed about our country's greatness.

In return for membership, Daily Caller Patriots will be able to read The Daily Caller without any of the ads that we have long used to support our mission. We know the ads drive you crazy. They drive us crazy too. But we need revenue to keep the fight going. If you join us, we will cut out the ads for you and put every Lincoln-headed cent we earn into amplifying our voice, training even more solid reporters, and giving you the ad-free experience and lightning fast website you deserve.

Patriots will also be eligible for Patriots Only content, newsletters, chats and live events with our reporters and editors. It's simple: welcome us into your lives, and we'll welcome you into ours.

We can save America together.

Become a Daily Caller Patriot today.

Signature

Neil Patel