OPINION:
Sen. Bernie Sanders, Vermont independent, will soon take the helm of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee. He has already promised that his chairmanship will “focus on universal health care.”
Mr. Sanders has long advocated a government takeover of the U.S. health insurance system. The crumbling of the government-run National Health Service in Britain should make that call a lot less appealing.
Look no further than the strikes by ambulance staff in England and Wales just before Christmas. The strikes come as waits for life-threatening emergency calls in Wales have reached their worst-ever levels. The story is similar in England, Scotland and Northern Ireland.
When patients do get to the hospital, they’re often stuck waiting outside, since no beds are available. Government statistics published in December reveal that roughly one-third of patients arriving at hospitals wait more than 30 minutes to be let in. About 15% wait more than an hour.
Dr. Adrian Boyle, president of the Royal College of Emergency Medicine, recently announced that in just one week, urgent and emergency care delays contributed to over 200 deaths.
And with the strikes last month, those numbers could get worse.
Britons must also wait for nonemergency care. More than 7.2 million Britons are on waitlists for medical care. Patients frequently wait months to get the care they need — and, in some cases, years.
In November, a 16-year-old learned that his wait time for an urgent urology appointment would be over 2½ years. Days later, an elderly cancer patient was informed that he’d need to wait until 2025 for a checkup.
Waits like these lead to worse health outcomes for British patients. Ninety-eight percent of U.S. prostate cancer patients live at least five years after a diagnosis, but just 88% of British prostate cancer patients do. Survival rates for bladder cancer are similarly disparate. Just 53% of British patients diagnosed with the disease live for five years, compared with 77% in the United States.
Those delays are the inevitable result of a government-run health care system perpetually short on resources and so unable to provide enough care to meet patient demand. Staffing shortages are so severe that 30,000 operations were canceled in 2021 because there weren’t enough doctors to perform them.
A survey from October suggests that more than 4 in 10 doctors in senior-level positions at NHS hospitals are planning to leave or take a break from their jobs in the next year. Half of senior surgeons are planning to do the same.
Britons pay hefty sums for their dysfunctional health care system. The average U.K. household forks over approximately 5,785 pounds — about $7,050 — in taxes each year to fund the NHS. That tax burden has increased by nearly 90% since 2000.
In order to dodge the waiting lists in the public system, an increasing number of people are opting to pay out-of-pocket for private care. More than 1 in 10 Britons have private insurance.
The upshot is that roughly 17% of health care spending in the United Kingdom is out-of-pocket. So much for “free” socialized medicine.
By contrast, just 11% of health care spending in the United States is out-of-pocket.
Mr. Sanders will no doubt use his new perch atop the Senate HELP Committee to make the case for Medicare for All. One look at the British National Health Service should unravel that case quickly.
• Sally C. Pipes is president, CEO and Thomas W. Smith fellow in health care policy at the Pacific Research Institute. Her latest book is “False Premise, False Promise: The Disastrous Reality of Medicare for All” (Encounter, 2020). Follow her on Twitter @sallypipes.
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