Economics of Healthcare

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Most of the population thinks that NHS treatment should be available without any limitation imposed by shortage of money.  But in the cold hard world all healthcare everywhere is rationed.

Cutting up the money
Cutting up the money

Adam Roberts: Future funding scenarios for the NHS and social care in England

“Market mechanisms yield distributional advantages for particular influential groups.
(1) A more costly health care system yields higher prices and incomes for suppliers—physicians, drug companies, and private insurers.
(2) Private payment distributes overall system costs according to use (or expected use) of services, costing wealthier and healthier people less than finance from (income-related) taxation.
(3) Wealthy and unhealthy people can purchase (real or perceived) better access or quality for themselves, without having to support a similar standard for others.
Thus there is, and always has been, a natural alliance of economic interest between service providers and upper-income citizens to support shifting health financing from public to private sources. Analytic arguments for the potential superiority of hypothetical competitive markets are simply one of the rhetorical forms through which this permanent conflict of economic interest is expressed in political debate.

(Going for the Gold: The Redistributive Agenda behind Market-Based Health Care Reform)Robert G. Evans