Britain was shocked on Tuesday by a new report outlining the National Health Service’s betrayal of hundreds of patients and the utter failure to hold those responsible to account.
The report found that between 1989 and 2000, more than 450 patients died at Gosport War Memorial Hospital after they were given excessive amounts of powerful drugs. This evidenced a “institutionalized regime” of “disregard for human life.” No one has thus far been held responsible. As the BBC notes, the only individual who has faced any kind of disciplinary proceeding is Dr. Jane Barton, who was criticized but not banned from practicing medicine.
Fortunately for patients, Barton decided to retire early. The report also condemned three separate police investigations into the patient deaths as “consistently poor” and excessively deferential to Gosport Hospital’s staff.
That joint failure of two government entities — the NHS and the police — stands out here. Because it shows what happens when power is centralized in government entities that have a bureaucratic disinterest in holding themselves to account. In this case, as in many, the absence of leadership and enforced mechanisms of oversight made a cover-up the natural course of action.
And that speaks to the deeper problem. While the NHS is staffed by superb professionals who work to serve the public and earn far less money than their American counterparts, it suffers one systemic flaw. As a massive government bureaucracy, it has a structural tendency to view individuals as statistics rather than as patients. That is a structural malady of socialism per se, but it is a particular problem in public health systems.
Don’t believe me? Just run a Google search for “NHS diagnosis cancer” or “NHS waiting times.”
Yet, while we should lament this situation, we must not oversimplify the debate in terms of “our healthcare is great and European systems are awful.” Yes, it’s true that if you have cancer, you want to be in the U.S. But we still continue to pay nearly twice as much for our healthcare as most other nations, but receive inferior outcomes in many key health-metrics. The ultimate lesson from Gosport is thus not only that socialized medicine offers the incentive for capriciousness, but also that individual patient interests must always center healthcare decision-making.
