All over the world babies are babies, and birth is birth, but having a baby in Oxford is certainly quite a different experience than having a baby in California. The comparison is mostly favourable to Oxford, in our experience. The prime directive of the NHS (which recently celebrated its 60th anniversary) is borrowed from Douglas Adams: Don’t Panic.
The NHS is a great success by any definition. When you factor in the constitutional niggardliness of the British taxpayers and Her Majesty’s government — leading the UK to spend per capita on healthcare substantially less than half what the US spends, and much less than any major industrialised country except Japan — it seems a veritable miracle of efficient socialism. Whereas health research in the US is dominated by the profit motive, producing marginally improved drugs at breathtakingly higher prices*, the NHS has a brilliant record of pioneering cost-effective healthcare solutions, which may be individually trivial, even slightly absurd, but which together add up to systematic and measurable improvements in public health. (For example, this scheme to prevent complications due to chronic lung disease by providing patients with automated telephone warnings of impending cold snaps. Or something as simple as reducing infections by requiring doctors and nurses to wear short sleeves.) Continue reading “In praise of the National Health Scapegoat”
Common Infirmities 