Bad Medicine

By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY | Posted Friday, January 18, 2008 4:20 PM PT

Health Care: The Brits have long suffered jokes about poor dentistry and bad teeth. That won't stop with the flight of dentists from the National Health Services.

Related Topics: Health Care

Since April 2006, one in every 10 dentists have stopped offering treatment under Great Britain's national health care system. Who can blame them? The government changed its contract with 21,000 dentists almost two years ago, and the result was more work for the dentists and limits on their earnings.

Because of the shortage, 2.7 million Britons have gone nearly two years without dental work. Alice Thomson drolly summed up the situation thusly in Friday's London Telegraph:

"In Britain today, you can stuff yourself on deep-fried Mars bars, drink 20 pints a night, inject yourself with heroin, smoke 60 cigarettes a day or decide to change your sex — and the NHS has an obligation to treat you. . . . But if you have bad teeth, forget it."

Still think British-style nationalized medicine is the way to go? Then consider these examples of government health care failure:

• Britons who use the NHS aren't allowed to buy with their own money new and effective medication that the government can't afford.

Those who do will be forced out of the state-run system.

The Economist reports that "a tidal wave of costly new drugs is about to break" — 40 of them to treat just cancer — in the next few years. The National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence, which decides which treatments are cost-effective enough to be dispensed by the NHS, will "reject most or all of them," a London cancer specialist told the magazine.

• Premature deaths in the U.K. due to deficiencies at the NHS topped 17,000 in 2004, more than in Spain, France, Germany and the Netherlands, says a study from the London-based Taxpayers' Alliance.

It's not that 2004, the last year for which data are available, was unusually tough. It was an improvement over the previous 23.

• A Canadian Medical Association study says that long waiting times, a hallmark of the socialist system that also is pitched as a model for the U.S., costs that country's economy $15 billion a year.

The loss is due to patients' and caregivers' absences from work, the increased costs of extra appointments, and drugs that patients need while they wait for treatment.

Like so many British teeth, national health care systems are rotten.

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