A Time for Revolutions — The Role of Clinicians in Health Care Reform (New Eng Jour Med)

[pinto]

A Time for Revolutions — The Role of Clinicians in Health Care Reform
July 22nd, 2009

Ara Darzi, M.D.

William Beveridge, the economist whose 1942 report led to the founding of Britain’s National Health Service (NHS), famously said that “a revolutionary moment in the world’s history is a time for revolutions, not for patching.”1 Given the combination of the global downturn and the time bomb that is health insurance costs, there is no denying that health care in the United States has reached such a moment. This matter is too important to be left to the politicians and policymakers; there is an urgent requirement for professional clinicians to step up and lead the debate.

President Barack Obama has brought health care reform to the forefront of people’s minds, and it is now a matter of when, not whether, change will come. Repeatedly quoted statistics — on the numbers of uninsured Americans, for example, or the high, rapidly growing expenditures on health care — leave no room for ambiguity, and groups across the political landscape recognize that the U.S. health care system is unsustainable in its current form.

Every country in the developed world confronts a similar challenge right now: finding a way to create a well-resourced but sustainable system that provides care of the highest quality to those who need it. One would be hard-pressed to find credible opponents — regardless of their political stripe — to the goal of providing “universal health care.” The disagreement arises when the discussion turns to the best way to achieve this aim. Each country needs to discover the formula that suits it best.

The outcome of health care reform in the United States will no doubt be very different from that in Britain, despite what some U.S. lobbying groups would have Americans believe. Britain’s NHS lies at the opposite end of the spectrum from the current U.S. system, in terms of both its structure (a tax-funded public program as opposed to mainly private, employment-based insurance) and the problems it faces (historically, a lack of resources and slow uptake of new treatments as opposed to bulging costs), but in the late 1990s Britain had to confront reform on a scale as challenging as that being contemplated in the United States today.

<more at>

http://healthcarereform.nejm.org/?p=999?query=TOC

Source Information

From the U.K. Department of Health and Imperial College — both in London.

This article (10.1056/NEJMp0905707) was published on July 22, 2009, at http://www.NEJM.org .

© 2009 Massachusetts Medical Society

[KoKo]

1. Looks like an interesting read...K&R

[John Q. Citizen]

2. An interesting article. Thanks