NHS provides private medical care for its staff

The Telegraph reports yet another great moment in government-run health care today.  The National Health Service, Britain’s government-run health care system, finds itself so unresponsive that it doesn’t trust itself to provide care for its employees.  Instead, they paid private physiotherapists to treat its staff rather than wait for NHS providers to become available (via Q&O):

An NHS trust has spent more than £12,000 on private treatment for hospital staff because its own waiting times are too long. The money was used to bring in physiotherapists to help workers recover from muscular-skeletal injuries at West Suffolk Hospital in Bury St Edmunds.

Bosses said it prevented them from leapfrogging NHS patients and enabled them to return to work more quickly.

However, the private treatment, which amounted to £12,116 for 271 appointments over the past year, was described by critics as “shocking”.

Mark Wallace of the TaxPayers’ Alliance said: “Their staff should have to wait like everybody else.  Perhaps if they experienced it as their customers – that is the taxpayer – experienced it, they might be a little keener to improve their waiting times.”

Gee — you think? Only in an Orwellian system like the NHS would their explanation make sense.  In order to get the staff back to work in order to serve the public that is forced to use the NHS that they fund, they have to go outside their system to get them the medical care they need more quickly.  Given the constraints of the status quo, they actually saved British taxpayers money and longer wait times.  Actually, Wallace’s suggestion would have cost everyone more money.

Obviously, Wallace misses the point.  The real problem with responsiveness isn’t the NHS staff, but with the lack of competition and the lack of resources in a shortage-management monopoly system.  The UK decides how many resources to provide the British populace, and the staff is just another rationed resource.  If the UK let Brits keep their money and relied on a free-market health care industry, the resources would grow to meet the demand, and wait times for treatment would no longer be an issue.

The NHS apparently agrees with this assessment.  They used the private market to get resources that the NHS itself had rationed into near oblivion to make sure they didn’t lose productivity.  Why not eliminate the NHS and let everyone have that option?  As long as the UK sucks income from its citizens to fund the NHS, most Brits won’t realistically have that option.