Despite many assurances to the contrary, The Daily Mail today has a story on how England's NHS is rationing healthcare, to the detriment of patients' lives.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/...
In England, the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence is the government agency tasked with studying the cost/benefit ratios of particular treatments and medications, and then making decisions about whether or not to approve those treatments.
The Government's rationing body said two drugs for advanced breast cancer and a rare form of stomach cancer were too expensive for the NHS.
[...]
One drug, Lapatinib, can halve the speed of growth of breast cancer in one in five women with an aggressive form of the disease.
[...]
Up to 1,500 stomach cancer patients also face a ban on Sutent – the only drug that can extend their lives.
American consumers are not used to being denied any treatment, no matter how expensive. This is one of the reasons we spend more on healthcare than any other country on earth. We spent 2.4 trillion dollars in 2008, 4.3 times more than we spent on the military (which is also the largest in the world).
Cutting administrative overhead will not bring the costs down to manageable levels; administrative costs are only about 480 billion/year. That still means roughly 2 trillion dollars...whereas we only collect about 1 trillion dollars in income taxes, total.
These are the tough decisions that will be forced onto anyone seeking to control the cost of healthcare....Obama and his advisors are in for a tough fight ahead.
(Numbers come from http://www.nchc.org/... )