Health Care Reform: UK Health System – Life is Better for Dogs

The Wall Street Journal recently published a comparison of the healthcare treatment for dogs and humans in Great Britain, and found that “it is better to be a dog.”

First, as a British dog owner, you get to choose your veterinarian. There is no delay in treatment, no waiting lists for dogs, and no postponed operations. Compared to humans, there is no bureaucracy to be negotiated. The idea that one patient could collapse the whole system is absent. The waiting rooms and relatives of patients are calmer, because people do not believe the system is cheating their “loved ones for economic reasons, of the treatment which he or she needs.”

In the U.K., relatives are terrified that someone is getting more out of the system than they are when a relative is being treated.

One obvious difference is that British dogs have to pay for care there at the time of services. By contrast, British humans receive healthcare that is free at the point of delivery. Interestingly, there is another source for treatment, the People’s Dispensary for Sick Animals (the “PDSA”). This is the dog’s safety net.

The PDSA resembles the National Health Service for British humans, and “no dog would go there if he had the choice to go elsewhere.” There are waiting lines, no options for choice, and the waiting rooms are much worse.

In order to make the PDSA better, the government could set-up an equalizing fund from which money would be dispensed purely on the basis of need rather than by their ability to pay. Conversely, if government control is to take over healthcare, the conditions for dogs in Britain would not improve.

The United States

While the U.S. spends a greater proportion of its gross domestic product on healthcare than any other advanced nation, “the results, as measured by the health of the population overall, are mediocre.” Most researchers explain this correlation with how physicians receive incentives for treatment: “they are paid by service or procedure rather than by results.”

An example of where this system of paying for results works is in France, however, the French government is facing a huge deficit because of the healthcare system. Considering America’s current economic situation, and future conditions, any chance of nationalizing healthcare would surely cripple our economy both now, and for the next fifty years.

Additionally, Britain supposedly allots healthcare independently of the ability to pay, and solely on the basis of clinical need, yet “the differences in the health of the rich and poor in Britain are among the greatest in the western world.” Hospitals are more unsanitary in Britain than any other European country, and “survival rates from cancer and cardiovascular disease are the lowest in the western world.”

As a result, researchers must realize that calculating the actual health of people in societies “is so complex that it is difficult to identify factors with any degree of certainty.” Therefore, America needs to avoid a uniform and nationalized healthcare reform, and instead needs to allow the individual states to take on this role.

Ultimately, the majority of the world’s progress in medicine and technology today comes from America. We pay for the advances in medical research and technological innovation, and our clinical research is superior to any other country. While the rest of the world is adopting our strategies that we pay for, we need to focus more on how to get this research to the patients.

Until then, it would seem that man’s best friend, seems to have the best medical treatment.