The US isn’t the only country that is worried about the financial state of its health care system, as the international news this weeks shows.
First up is the UK, where the meltdown of the government seem to be getting worse and worse (tax payer paid adult movies! musical chairs ministers! disastrous EU parliament election returns!) and it is no surprise that the National Health Service has not been immune.
According to The Times, “the NHS needs another £10 billion from the taxpayer to survive in three years' time (put another way, just less than the cost of paying for the entire police service).” Despite the vitriol poured on the NHS by American opponents of single payer medicine, it remains quite popular with the British public so implying that it could collapse if the government doesn’t pay up is a neat bit of scaremongering.
Further, if you’ve followed the news on the NHS at all over the last ten years, you know that the health service is continually given more money, with precious little to show for it. Wait times have gone down somewhat but the system’s productivity went down 4.3 percent between 1997 and 2007. At the same time, in 1999, the NHS received approximately £45 billion a year, today it is £105 billion. Nonetheless, Bloomberg News put the current budget shortfall of the NHS at £15 billion.
Meanwhile, the opposition Conservatives appear poised to repeat the mistakes of Labor if they get in at the next election, which seems almost guaranteed. Despite unceasing criticisms of the spending of the present Prime Minister and the huge deficit created, the Conservative health spokesman, Andrew Lansley told Britons that his party would up the NHS budget, whatever happened with the economy in the future, and while spending on everything else would be slashed.
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On the Continent, conflict in Berlin over the growing gap in the funding for Germany’s health care system is continuing. This January saw the introduction of a new payment scheme in which premiums are paid into a central fund by the insured along with federal money and then the cash is distributed from there to the sickness funds. But the amount of money in the fund has proved to be short of the actual expenditures on health by some €2.9 billion and the sickness funds want the state to contribute more.
Health Minister Ulla Schmidt, however, has not been very sympathetic. Earlier this week she told Financial Times Deutschland that “[s]ome have clearly lost connection to reality” and criticized their “exorbitance.” She also opined that “[i]t cannot be that everyone in the health care system always just calls for more money.” (Translations mine.)
This week also saw a decision against the private sickness funds by Germany’s top court. The private funds had sought to overturn a provision of the most recent reform which required them to offer a cheaper basic health care plan.
