Out With Rationing, in With Price Controls -Britain's 'reform' will do little to improve access ..

wsj ^ | 5/25/10 | editor

[Nachum]

David Cameron's new coalition promised last week to reform Britain's drug-rationing body so that "all patients can access the drugs and treatments their doctors think they need." If this sounds too good to be true from the NHS, that's because it is.

The scheme's "value-based pricing" carries the whiff of market-based reform, but when decoded it means the opposite. "Value-based pricing" translates to expanding Westminster's power to limit pharmaceutical prices.

[Buckeye McFrog]

“value-based pricing”

Sounds like they’ll have a guy named Darelle promoting it in adverts on the tele...

[yefragetuwrabrumuy]

The best bet for the NHS, and medicine in general, is to ‘over-introduce’ competition. Since Britain is very bad off, the way to start this is to first permit the opening of commercial clinics, specializing in what the NHS does the worst.

Lots of opportunity, there. But let’s say, dentistry. The first real problem is that there is a huge dentist shortage. This means there also has to be enabling legislation to train a legion of dentists. So the British medical schools will have to be required to discard their enrollment limits. Anyone with a proper education should be able to enroll, with relaxed limits on graduation as well.

As you can tell, this is going to cause problems, because of the time required to train that many new dentists. And the way around that problem is to import dentists from other parts of Europe. Dentists who are willing to take qualification exams, but if they pass, to make a lot of money quickly.

Limited years for them to work on as many patients as they can, at whatever price the traffic will bear. There will be a time limit on how many years they can practice in Britain, but after the new crop of dentists come out, they can sell their practices to them, and return home with a substantial nest egg.

This means the newly graduated dentists will walk right in to established practices, and immediately start making money, while lots of British citizens get their teeth taken care of promptly.

By comparison, while this time of active dentistry is going on, the performance of dentistry by the NHS will drop to a fraction of where it is now. But that is fine, and enough for the very poor. Yet if they save up their pennies, they may choose to get it done right in a commercial clinic.

And this will continue with specialty after specialty, until there is a robust commercial health care system in Britain.