Nationally Managed Health Care: How Britain Does It

By Christopher Marshall. It’s not news to anyone that in the United States today we are at a crossroads when it comes to the direction that health care will take in this country. With literally millions of people unable to afford even the most basic medical care, a means of universal coverage needs to be addressed if health care is to be a right and not a privilege. One of the options that we face is the controversial idea of nationally managed health care. If the regulation of the medical industry were to come under the auspices of the federal government, how might they handle it?. A likely model would be the British system known as the National Health Service (NHS). Though politicians decry the ‘bureaucracy’ that would accompany such a plan, Britain’s system works quite logically, and easily takes into account the local differences in health care.. In the NHS, money flows into the system mainly from taxes and is redistributed by the government to hospitals and physicians. There is a central government planning agency and, at the local level, there are some 100 health authorities who are directly responsible for "purchasing" health services for the population within their jurisdiction based on their needs. The local health authority is given a budget to obtain services mainly from NHS providers within a particular geographical area but may, on occasion, ...

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