Daniel Hannan, parlamentario europeo por el Partido Conservador británico, ha levantado polvareda por sus declaraciones sobre la sanidad pública inglesa en una gira por Estados Unidos. De convicciones liberales y admirador de Ron Paul, Hannan ha dicho ante los medios americanos que Estados Unidos debe evitar adoptar el modelo de sanidad pública británico (National Health Service). La opinión de Hannan choca con la del portavoz de sanidad de su partido y la de su líder, David Cameron.
Los medios hostiles al liberalismo han tardado poco en acusar a Hannan de faltar el respeto a los empleados de la sanidad pública (?) y de querer implantar el sistema americano en el Reino Unido. Hannan responde en su blog del Telegraph:
Nor do I believe - as Peter Mandelson seems fatuously to be claiming - that Britain should adopt a US-style insurance-based system. While in the States last week, I repeatedly emphasised that I thought their set-up could be improved, that costs were too high, that litigation drove up premiums and that powers could be shifted from big insurance companies to individuals. There is a difference between saying that the US shouldn’t adopt the British model and saying that Britain should adopt the American model. Think about it for a few seconds and you’ll see that it’s quite an obvious difference.
If you want to go in for shorthand categorisation by country, the model I’ve been pushing for is one of personal healthcare accounts, a system most closely approximated in Singapore, whose people enjoy a higher level of healthcare than Britons do while paying considerably less for it.
En una entrada anterior resumía por qué Singapur le parece un modelo de referencia a la hora de plantear reformas, destacando que un avance hacia la liberalización no implica que el Estado no pueda seguir atendiendo a los más pobres.
In The Plan, published last year and co-authored with Douglas Carswell, I set out at length a scheme to replace the current government monopoly in healthcare with a Singapore-style system of personal health accounts. The Singapore system produces better outcomes than ours for half the price. If we spent the same percentage of GDP on healthcare as now, but put equivalent power in the hands of our consumers, it seems not unreasonable to suppose that we would be much healthier. (Incidentally, the state pays for those who can’t afford their own accounts in Singapore, as in every developed country. It never ceases to amaze me how many British people have been convinced that free healthcare for the poor is a unique property of the NHS.)
Bryan Caplan explicaba algunos rasgos de la sanidad singapurense en Econlong: Singapore's Health Care System: A Free Lunch You Can Sink Your Teeth Into
Aprovecho para recomendar también este artículo de David Godhill que Dani enlazaba en su blog hace unas semanas a propósito de la reforma sanitaria en Estados Unidos: How American Health Care Killed My Father. Explica muy buen cuáles son los problemas del modelo actual y en qué dirección debería encaminarse la reforma.
