The WSJ editorial page notes: "The official who will preside over this fiscal trainwreck is Donald Berwick, the Harvard professor and chief of the Institute for Healthcare Improvement who the White House has nominated to run Medicare. Dr. Berwick explained in an interview last year that the British National Health Service has "developed very good and very disciplined, scientifically grounded, policy-connected models for the evaluation of medical treatments from which we ought to learn." He added that "The decision is not whether or not we will ration care—the decision is whether we will ration with our eyes open. And right now, we are doing it blindly."
Meanwhile in the UK, Britain's Department of Health said investment in the NHS had risen from £35bn in 1997 to more than £110bn by 2011. That's over 200 percent, twice as fast as it did in the US. At the same time, UK oncologists note: "We now spend similar amounts to Europe on health generally and cancer care in particular, but less than two thirds of the European average on cancer drugs.... It just can't be that everybody else around the world is wrong about access to innovative cancer care and the NHS right in rationing it so severely."
No, it is also that UK cancer survival rates are still the lowest in Western Europe.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/7579422.stm
Yes, "discipline" indeed.
Here's my take on Berwick's sweeping and silly assertions. Do we really want someone so driven by ideology and biased against our own healthcare system to head up CMS?
http://spectator.org/archives/2010/04/26/the-fix-is-in
Meanwhile in the UK, Britain's Department of Health said investment in the NHS had risen from £35bn in 1997 to more than £110bn by 2011. That's over 200 percent, twice as fast as it did in the US. At the same time, UK oncologists note: "We now spend similar amounts to Europe on health generally and cancer care in particular, but less than two thirds of the European average on cancer drugs.... It just can't be that everybody else around the world is wrong about access to innovative cancer care and the NHS right in rationing it so severely."
No, it is also that UK cancer survival rates are still the lowest in Western Europe.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/7579422.stm
Yes, "discipline" indeed.
Here's my take on Berwick's sweeping and silly assertions. Do we really want someone so driven by ideology and biased against our own healthcare system to head up CMS?
http://spectator.org/archives/2010/04/26/the-fix-is-in
