February 26, 1975

British Experience Slows Health Plan Drive

There is a snake in Great Britain's medical Garden of Eden!

The womb-to-tomb National Health Service is about to go under after 26 years of free medicine and surgery.

The great social experiment has worsened health service in that country, and the experience is giving U.S. lawmakers second thoughts about a similar system here.

Everybody in Britain is entitled to free medical care.  The physicians, nurses and hospital staff under NHS are paid by the government.

However, the doctors and technicians threaten mass resignations.  Their salaries have fallen to that of unskilled workers - in many cases less.

The nation's 23,000 nationalized physicians earn an average of $14,000 per year.  Interns make $5,000 a year for an 80-hour week.  Dentists average $13,000 annually.

Nonmedical staff workers have walked off the job in many hospitals.  Some hospitals are closing permanently - 85 in the Birmingham industrial area alone.  Outpatients are turned away.

Emergency cases are treated promptly, but patients needing corrective surgery have to get on a waiting a list for up to a year.

There are about as many private physicians as nationalized and their fees are substantially higher.  The private doctors are the most competent and are swamped with patients.  But they, too, are handicapped because they are allowed to use about one percent of Britain's hospital beds.

Even this tiny, profitable fraction of Britain's medical business is bitterly resented by the socialist labor unions.  A strike by the National Union of Public Employees demanded an end of the last vestige of private medical practice.  The government caved in and barred all but a token few beds to private doctors.

As the war of nerves between socialists and physicians escalates, so does the backlog of applications by doctors to leave the country.  Thus, every belligerent move by the government deepens the crisis.

The British Medical Association takes a typically English view of the situation - acknowledgement of the other fellow's position, but dogged determination not to accept it.

Dr.  Brian Lewis, a member of the association ruling council told a Scripps-Howard interviewer that his group was "not opposed to a health service for that's a proper part of a civilized country for people who can't cope."

He complained that the present national health service could provide either two-thirds of the service for 100 percent of the people, or 100 percent of the service for two-thirds of the people.

The medical association favors providing the latter approach - total free service for most citizens.  Those most able to pay would cover their needs with medical insurance on which they would receive tax credit.

This makes sense for the higher-income citizens trying to hold on to the few shreds of private initiative in a nearly communist society.  But it is a pitiful delaying tactic.

The majority resents any hint of above-average success or privilege and is willing - no, eager - to bring down the temple rather than compromise the utopian dream of life without risk.

U.S. Congressmen watch developments in Great Britain with increasing nervousness.  They have promised a national medical and health program that would insure complete care for all Americans.

The cost of $6 billion annually so blithely pulled out of the air now looks more like $60 billion for starters.  Such high order of mathematics never used to bother our law makers.  Lately, however, they have had to admit there just isn't that much money, physically, in existence.

In fact, the worry here has become one of how to save the Social Security and Medicare plans we already have.  These systems will be bankrupt in 15 years unless something drastic is done soon to refund them.

The Social Security payroll tax of six percent on employees matched by six percent on employers is so regressive that it now has an immediate and drastic impact on employment.

The only answer, of course, is to start supporting Social Security from general tax revenues - primarily the personal income tax - or cut services, or both.

It is not likely even an irresponsible Congress will have the nerve to set up a laudable but impossible health plan while the pension and old age health plans are threatened.

Hopefully, the British experience is teaching us a valuable lesson: that half, a loaf is better than none.

The garden of Eden has a beguiling snake that promises us a free lunch, but Adam and Eve didn't find it and neither will we.

Author: Lindsey Williams