I was talking to a British man a couple of days ago and he told me something about the British National Health Service that I had not known. It seems the NHS employs some 1.3 million people. That is the third largest employer in the world behind only the Chinese Army and the Indian National Railway. (That’s what the British man told me, the wikipedia entry confuses a bit, throwing in a couple of others).
Numbers are a bit hard to find, but only something in the neighborhood of 137,000 doctors practice in the United Kingdom (staffing ratio of 2.25 per thousand from the tables).
The UK has about 61 million in population.
So, doing some math then.
About one out of 47 people in Britain is employed by the NHS.
Only about one in ten NHS employees is a doctor.
Socialized medicine is touted as efficient?
You have just given us a snapshot of what health care in the US will look like in a few years if the Obamessiah and his worshipers can ram their health care program down our throats.
Only about one in ten NHS employees is a doctor.
Actually that strikes me as a surprisingly high ratio of doctors to other health care workers.
But please don’t mistake me for a supporter of ‘health care reform’ or whatever socialized medicine nonsense is being peddled in Washington.
Two points.
First, for every doctor there are a tremendous amount of other people involved in providing ambulatory and facility based care.
Nurses, other clinical assistancts, and clerical staff at the physician’s own office; clinical laboratory personnel and their support staff; pharmacists and their assistants; specialty diagnostic service; hospital nurses and every other type of clinical or support staff within the hospital; ditto for nursing homes or other long term care facilities…
That’s a hell of alot of people providing care or providing support services for care, even when the doctor is not actually present. Which brings me to the second point.
That ratio is actually frighteningly high, it says there aren’t a whole lot of other people involved in meeting the needs of patients. That all of those other wonderful aspects of care that make the US the place to get treatment (e.g. MRIs, PET scan, CAT scans, laparoscopic procedures, a massive pharmacopeia, etc.) are either not available, or lack the support staff to provide them.
It is even more bleak when you consider how bad the ratio of physicians to patients is in the UK as compared to the US.
Once again, all of this point up the simple truth that you always get what you pay for an with American health care we pay a lot because we get a lot.
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