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Brain -> Britain Plans to Decentralize Health Care (7/25/2010 1:50:16 PM)
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Harper will do the same (cut spending on healthcare) in Canada if he gets a chance with a majority government. They have billions for war but no money for health care.
Britain Plans to Decentralize Health Care
LONDON — Perhaps the only consistent thing about Britain’s socialized health care system is that it is in a perpetual state of flux, its structure constantly changing as governments search for the elusive formula that will deliver the best care for the cheapest price while costs and demand escalate.
Even as the new coalition government said it would make enormous cuts in the public sector, it initially promised to leave health care alone. But in one of its most surprising moves so far, it has done the opposite, proposing what would be the most radical reorganization of the National Health Service, as the system is called, since its inception in 1948.
Practical details of the plan are still sketchy. But its aim is clear: to shift control of England’s $160 billion annual health budget from a centralized bureaucracy to doctors at the local level. Under the plan, $100 billion to $125 billion a year would be meted out to general practitioners, who would use the money to buy services from hospitals and other health care providers.
Tens of thousands of jobs would be lost because layers of bureaucracy would be abolished.
Many critics say that the plans are far too ambitious, particularly in the short period of time allotted, and they doubt that general practitioners are the right people to decide how the health care budget should be spent.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/25/world/europe/25britain.html?_r=5&hp=&pagewanted=all
[image]local://upfiles/392475/983785AC1929403E95CDEA8092EBBAA9.jpg[/image]
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