NHS Meltdown: Paying Weight Watchers but Rationing Care
The NHS disarray continues. In the scheme of things--with people in the UK unable to get good pain control and hospitals having receptionists examine patients--this is small. But it is symbolic of what happens in socialized systems. From the story:
I know weight control is important to good health, but Weight Watchers is not medical treatment. Moreover, if these people were morbidly obese, they should have received real medical help, not small prepackaged meals or aerobics classes.The Health Service has paid out more than £3 million to the two biggest slimming firms in the country, Weight Watchers and Slimming World, for providing classes to overweight people referred to them by GPs. Since 2006, primary care trusts have bought vouchers entitling more than 70,000 people to free slimming classes.
New NHS fat camp for obese families in Rotherham. While the companies were paid upfront, less than 60 per cent of those who were referred by their GP stuck with the 12-week course, which cost £65 for classmates paying from their own pockets.
Critics lambasted the state-funded schemes as an "appalling" use of taxpayers money by a health service which rations treatment and life-extending drugs for patients with cancer. Meanwhile, obesity experts warned that diet classes were less likely to work if people did not attend them of their own volition, and commit their own money to their efforts.In 2006, the NHS's rationing body, the National Institute of Health and Clinical Excellence, recommended that GPs send people to free slimming classes, because it was cheaper than weight loss pills or stomach stapling. Since then, Slimming World has sold more than 53,000 vouchers costing £45 to the NHS at a total cost to the taxpayer of more than £2.3 million.
Oversight boards like NICE are disastrous on more levels than can be counted. We have to make sure that no equivalent central control is ever imposed on Americans.
posted by Wesley J. Smith @ 10:16 AM
3 Comments
3 Comments:
This is what I'm afraid of with the nationalization of healthcare in America. I'm not against universal healthcare if rationing doesn't result, but this is the kind of thing I think will happen-the government will focus so much on preventive measures that it will deliberately give money to Weight Watchers instead of pain control specialists for their patients. I don't know how the American people should seek to prevent this, as Washington doesn't seem to be listening, but we have to remain vigilant and try our hardest.
Washington doesn't listen while Obama, who "listens," it's said, to a teleprompter, is going on a talk show (Leno?) tonight.
I'm not a fan of universal health care. Where in the Constitution is it indicated that that is part of what the federal government is supposed to do? Sure, it allows for much, but that's too far in my opinion. The medical establishment has become a mess because "being a doctor" (like anything else that brings financial success and status) was a goal of many parents for their offspring after WWII, and society has lost its sense of values and standards, and those who have become doctors grew up in the wrong mindset; add in the insurance companies and their influence, and we've got what we've got now. Unless the professions (including the law) stop thinking of themselves as businesses, and return to regarding themselves as professions that put ethics first, "universal health care" can continue to be regarded as a "solution," which can't work because it involves beginning from the wrong premises, for the wrong reasons.
"National Institute of Health and Clinical Excellence" rings sort of like "ethics committee."
On top of "cost" and utilitarianism (and futilitarianism), there's nanny government, too. We've got a governor who wants to tax soda that has sugar in it, on the grounds that it will decrease childhood obesity, and who has talked to parents as if they don't know how to look out for their own kids in that respect (well, let's don't start on the state of parenting among some these days) as part of a program to increase tax revenue (from something at the same time people are being told not to buy, and does anyone wonder how the Empire State has gotten into the state it's in?). This by comparison at least is brutally honest, in a sense, in not even purporting to put health before cost, while NICE remains, tellingly, oxymoronic.
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