Universal Healthcare the National Health

Universal Healthcare

The National Health Service of the United Kingdom

The National Health Service (NHS) provides comprehensive health coverage to all citizens and legal immigrants within the United Kingdom, regardless of income and employment status. It is financed through a system of national taxation. All citizens of the UK receive identification numbers that enable them to be treated free of charge by public providers of healthcare. Citizens register with a GP (general practitioner) and must be referred by their GP to a specialist, if their condition is deemed to warrant such care. All physicians within the NHS system are government employees are receive a salary from the government. The NHS is called a 'single-payer' system. When an individual seeks care, he or she does not pay for the treatment directly -- all treatment is provided as a service to UK taxpayers (Ham 2005).

The greatest strength of this system is its universality. Disease rates and health complications due to a lack of ability to pay for treatment are nonexistent, as is the rate of bankruptcies caused by medical ailments, in contrast to the United States. 45 million American citizens under the age of 65 lack health insurance coverage (Ham 2005). In the UK, when a person is sick, he or she does not need to worry about affording chemotherapy or other expensive treatments, or that his or her health plan is insufficiently comprehensive. Patients are not dependant upon insurance companies that ration care or coverage because of their need to make a profit. Major health disparities do not exist because of employment status or inability to obtain healthcare, although private coverage and physicians do exist. Tourists and non-legal immigrants are also entitled to emergency-based care (Ham 2005).

However, there have been accusations that the NHS 'gateway' system of cost containment, involving rationing healthcare based upon GP approval, has resulted in insufficiently aggressive intervention for some medical conditions. For example, the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) sets guidelines for the use of specific medications, based upon their proven efficacy for certain conditions. NICE has set restrictions on the use of anti-cancer drugs such as Erbitux which can only be used for patients with liver cancer if the disease has not spread (Hope 2010). This drug is far more available in the U.S. Others complain about waiting lists for specialists or refusals by their GPs to see much-needed specialists. Specialists in fields of practice such as mental health and dentistry are often scarce, in certain areas of the country. And because of lower tax revenues due to the recession and rising costs due to the aging of the population, the NHS has placed limits on routine orthopedic surgeries, such as hip and knee replacements, and radically restricted the funding of infertility treatments (Donnelly 2010).

However, despite these admitted problems, the United States spends almost 15% of gross domestic product on health care compared with less than 8% in the United Kingdom and a higher proportion of the British population thinks their system works well. (Hull 2005). When the recent Conservative government was elected to power, it reassured the nation that it would take steps to bolster the NHS and believed in the concept of universal healthcare. It has even taken steps to expand, rather than limit access of patients to expensive, experimental drugs (Hope 2010).