Rationing by Waiting
Poetry in the Waiting Room was the brainchild of a poet who discovered many of his friends were spending lots of time in NHS waiting rooms. It’s funded by the British Arts Council and the NHS and aims, according to a brochure, “to comfort those waiting to see the doctor through poetry.” An informational footnote declared that the pamphlets were described “in a House of Lords debate as the most widely read national poetry publication.”
This is from an article praising British health care vis-à-vis U.S. health care. It appears in Kaiser Health News. No reference to all the premature deaths in Britain due to substandard cancer care.
This is a hoot, on many levels. So waiting has social value after all. It leads to a more literate populace.
This post shows why I come here first for health news, instead of going to Kaiser.
Maybe we should put copies of Atlas Shrugged in all the waiting rooms. Apparently people would have the time to read it, and think of all the good that would do.
Or “The Road to Serfdom” or “Free to Choose.” The possibilites are endless.
Maybe we should require that all future studies of what various countries spend on health care must include estimates of the opportunity cost of waiting for care, along with estimates of the cost of excess mortality and morbidity and the cost of programs to mask the cost of the wait.
The article also notes that the waiting-room poetry books are the most widely read publications in the U.K.! I also find that American journalists who live in Canada or the U.K. and write for a broad American audience tend to get to the front of the line when they seek specialist treatment in those countries. What a coincidence!
One understands that the writer was under great stress and emotional turmoil, but she has done no research into the basic structure of health care in either country: “Every feature of U.S. health care, from insurance company to doctor’s office to drug company, exists as a separate for-profit enterprise. Here, health care is part of the social fabric.”
Come one! British physicians are embroiled in constant negotiations over the budget for the National Health Service. And GlaxoSmithKline and AstraZeneca (British drugmakers) are just as profit-oriented as Pfizer and Eli Lilly. Over here, almost all hospitals are non-profit and I’ll bet he Columbia University health plan was a non-profit. (Come to think of it, why wasn’t she able to buy coverage in New York as an individual: That state has guaranteed issue and community rating in the individual market, and not even age-rating either! Of course, we policy analysts know that those policies don’t actually make coverage more accessible.) I’m not fully on top of NY insurance regs, but I’d bet if she went immediately from her Columbia student plan to an individual plan, she would not have had a waiting period for her breast-cancer coverage either.
Terrible editing/fact-checking by KHN, which is a specialized health-policy journalistic enterprise.
John, good comment. This was a very poorly fact checked piece.