When his wife suffers a stroke, an American journalist visiting London gets a close-up view of the NHS. David Asman's verdict, in the Wall St Journal (reg required) makes compelling reading. And it's much more ambivalent than you might expect. (Am I allowed to mention that he's a Fox News anchor? You know, they're the people who are supposed to be propagandists for the great right-wing conspiracy.)
The bad points about his wife's treatment? The less than state-of-the-art equipment and - it goes without saying - the standard of cleanliness:
When I covered Latin America for The Wall Street Journal, I'd visit hospitals, prisons and schools as barometers of public services in the country. Based on my Latin American scale, Queen's Square would rate somewhere in the middle. It certainly wasn't as bad as public hospitals in El Salvador, where patients often share beds. But it wasn't as nice as some of the hospitals I've seen in Buenos Aires or southern Brazil. And compared with virtually any hospital ward in the U.S., Queen's Square would fall short by a mile....When my wife and I walked into Cornell University Hospital in New York after a month in England, the first thing we noticed was the floors. They were not only clean. They were shining! We were giddy with the prospect of not constantly engaging in germ warfare...
One can tell that the edge has disappeared in treatment in Britain. For example, when we returned to the U.S. we discovered that treatment exists for thwarting the effects of blood clots in the brain if administered shortly after a stroke. Such treatment was never mentioned, even after we were admitted to the neurology hospital. Indeed, the only medication my wife was given for a severe stroke was a daily dose of aspirin.
Not as bad as El Salvador. It wouldn't make much of a campaign slogan, would it? Still, Asman has compliments too:
There is much better teamwork among doctors, nurses and physical therapists in Britain. In fact, once a week at Queen's Square, all the hospital's health workers--from high to low--would assemble for an open forum on each patient in the ward. That way each level knows what the other level is up to, something glaringly absent from U.S. hospital management. Also, British nurses have far more direct managerial control over how the hospital wards are run. This may somewhat compensate for their meager wages...
There is also much less of a tendency in British medicine to make decisions on the basis of whether one will be sued for that decision. This can lead to a much healthier period of recuperation...
British doctors, nurses and physical therapists also seem to put much more stock in the spiritual side of healing...
Asman gives careful thought to the hidden costs in both systems. The bill he received from the NHS was extraordinarily low by US standards, but that, he argues, has to be set against the higher levels of British taxation. Finally, a riposte to those in the UK who like to see these issues in stark black-and-white terms:
[A]dvocates of socialized medicine point out that while the British system may not be as rich as U.S. heath care, no patient is turned away. To which I would respond that my wife's one roommate at Cornell University Hospital in New York was an uninsured homeless woman, who shared the same spectacular view of the East River and was receiving about the same quality of health care as my wife. Uninsured Americans are not left on the street to die.
(Via Vodkapundit)