Open Thread: Britain Decentralizing National Health Care
by NB Staff
For general discussion and debate. Possible talking point: Britain decentralizing its National Health Care.

Practical details of the plan are still sketchy. But its aim is clear: to shift control of England's $160 billion annual health budget from a centralized bureaucracy to doctors at the local level. Under the plan, $100 billion to $125 billion a year would be meted out to general practitioners, who would use the money to buy services from hospitals and other health care providers. The plan would also shrink the bureaucratic apparatus, in keeping with the government's goal to effect $30 billion in "efficiency savings" in the health budget by 2014 and to reduce administrative costs by 45 percent. Tens of thousands of jobs would be lost because layers of bureaucracy would be abolished.

Isn't it embarrassing that as European nations realize their socialist programs are bankrupting them we have a President and an entire political Party trying to emulate here what is failing there?