Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
One of the key benefits of the UK health system is that everyone has access to care. However, is care provided equally to all people? A paper by Matias et al. (2024) examines whether or not there are any inequalities in waiting times by socioeconomic status for women diagnosed with breast cancer in England and…
That is the topic from a recent study by Hayes et al. (2024): Payments for some diagnostic scans undertaken in outpatient settings were unbundled from Diagnosis Related Group based payments in England in April 2013 to address under-provision. Unbundled scans attracted additional payments of between £45 and £748 directly following the reform. We examined the…
Perhaps so according to the health policy editor at the Guardian. He writes that as NHS has grown weaker, private medical insurance is becoming a more attractive option. The long delays for NHS care that are now endemic – and cause so much worry, risk and harm to those left waiting – are not going…
That is according to an article today from the BBC. NHS leaders in Scotland have discussed abandoning the founding principles of the service by having the wealthy pay for treatment.The discussion of a “two-tier” health service is mentioned in draft minutes of a meeting of Scotland’s NHS leaders in September. They also raise the possibility…
Louisiana has already begun adopting a “Netflix” pricing model to pay for Hepatitis C treatments. Rather than pay per treatment, Louisiana would pay a flat rate per month to access as many Hepatitis C treatments as they need. The benefit of this is (i) states have predictable budgets and (ii) manufacturers have predicable revenues. This…
A paper by McDermott et al. (2019) examines how primary care services are commissioned in the United Kingdom under the National Health Service (NHS). Interestingly, the study provides a nice overview of the history of GP contracting in the UK as well. An excerpt is below. The current primary care system in England, whereby GPs…
How long does it take to get treated for cancer in the United Kingdom’s National Health Service (NHS)? How long does it take for ambulances to arrive? What about wait times at ED visits? An article in The Independent answers these questions with statistics from NHS itself. The answer to the above questions, about 1…
This week, the UK’s National Health Service (NHS) and National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) released a document titled Evidence standards framework for digital health technologies. An accompanying piece in The Lancet by Greaves et al. (2018) aims to describe the goals of the document at a high level. The authors state that key…
You may think you know single payer systems, but do you really? Last week, the NHS celebrated 70 years of existence. The Guardian has an interactive article that you can use to guess how health care in England has changed over the past 70 years. I encourage you to read the article and test your…
Last weekend, the United Kingdom’s National Health Service (NHS) turned 70. NHS is a protocolical single payer system. Whereas Canada is a single payer system, provinces rather than the federal government makes most decisions and providers (i.e., hospitals and physicians) are private, for-profit businesses. In the Netherlands, on the other hand, both providers and health…