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Saturday 17 May 2008

Medicine without frontiers is arriving (The Times)

I have a piece in today's Times on the European Commission's plam for cross-border healthcare. You can read it here.

Here's an extract:

It's a solid rule of thumb that whenever Frank Dobson offers an opinion, one should swiftly jump to the opposite conclusion. So if you are in any doubt as to the merits of the European Commission's plan to rationalise the current hodge-podge of arrangements for patients being treated outside their own country, consider this: Mr Dobson thinks it is a terrible idea.

As if that wasn't proof enough for you of the plan's virtues, the former Health Secretary has been joined by more than 50 of the most backward- looking of his fellow Labour MPs in signing an early day motion opposing it. It's clearly an idea of the utmost sagacity.

...Many bilateral agreements allowing patients to choose to be treated abroad are already in place, such as the “euregios”, which the German health insurance bodies set up with Dutch providers and which now includes Belgium. Some French areas co-operate with regions on their Belgian, German, Italian and Spanish borders. There are numerous other examples. Ministers are, apparently, worried that if the plans are pushed through, NHS patients will up sticks and opt for treatment in foreign hospitals that are not infested with MRSA or that offer better, faster and more successful treatments. So the word is that they will resist the plans.

And that pretty much says all we need to know about the mindset of our healthcare masters. They will resist giving patients a choice because they might exercise it. Here's what Mr Dobson had to say: “It will be catastrophic for the NHS if this directive goes through. The Commission either has no idea what damage this will cause to our NHS, or they simply don't care.”

Why will it be catastrophic if the NHS is capable of providing what patients need? Why on earth would anyone with a cataract in Humberside or a faulty hip in Cumbria choose to be treated in Madrid, Budapest or anywhere else in the EU if their local hospital gave them what they needed? No sane person would make that choice. If the NHS was in a position to offer the same level of care as that offered abroad, the impact of any such plan would be minimal. That's why it'll be “catastrophic for the NHS”. Having spent hundreds of billions of pounds attempting to prove that money would end the NHS's problems, it hasn't. So if patients are offered a choice of something better, they'll grab it.

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