An organization of British doctors is lobbying to get the National Health Service to start charging patients something for their treatment because of the large deficit the system is running, which is causing rationing of medical care to occur.
An open letter from 900 NHS doctors to be delivered to Tony Blair today warns that the health service cannot survive in its present form and that individuals should expect to pay for treatment in the future.
The doctors said a healthcare system funded only from taxes was bound to fail to meet patients’ rising expectations. Rationing of services and bigger financial deficits were the inevitable result of preserving the status quo, they said.
The letter was drawn up by the pressure group Doctors For Reform, which claims to be politically unaligned. It calls on Mr Blair, the Conservative leader, David Cameron, and Sir Menzies Campbell, the leader of the Liberal Democrats, to carry out urgent policy reviews.
The doctors’ intervention is a direct challenge to Labour’s mantra that the NHS should be free at the point of delivery, and it comes as the NHS in England is heading for a big overspend despite three years of record investment.
Trusts have forecast an overall deficit of £720m in 2005/6 and many of the worst affected have postponed non-emergency operations and frozen staff vacancies until the start of the new financial year. Over the past few weeks 15 trusts have announced plans to cut their workforce by about 5,000. Further redundancies and hospital closures are expected to follow.
The 900 doctors said the only way of pulling the NHS out of its crisis was to turn to a “mixed funding system”. The letter adds: “While the taxpayer can guarantee access, it is not honest to say taxpayers’ resources are meeting rising patients’ needs today, nor is it realistic to say they will do so tomorrow.”
Alternative sources of funding could include asking patients to contribute part of the cost of services that are still performing poorly. Another option would be to switch to an insurance-based healthcare system based on models that work effectively in other parts of Europe.
It’s really very simple. When you don’t charge a patient anything when they go to the doctor or to the emergency room, overutilization of services will occur, since there’s no incentive for the person to not seek medical attention for every little thing. That leads to deficits, and subsequent rationing of care, meaning that patients can not get care that they actually need because somebody got care that they really didn’t need. That’s one of the serious problems that socialized medical systems face, and one of the main reasons why they don’t work well, and should not be adopted here.
