Health and Welfare

Growing restrictions on the use of expensive treatments in European and Canadian healthcare systems have “alarming implications” for innovation in drugs research, according to a new report.

The second paper in the Stockholm Network A Healthy Market? series, Health Technology Assessment in Context, warns that rationing the use of life-extending medical technologies will have unfortunate, long-term implications – and it urges policy makers to go down the US route of less state funding and greater consumer choice.

A recent report entitled 'Cholesterol: the public policy imlications of not doing enough' produced by the pan-European think-tank Stockholm Network reviews the potential impact of curreetn uncontrolled cholesterol levels on European economies, societies, and healthcare structures by 2020. The Stockholm Network report arrived at several important conclusions...

Britain has been permitting private hospitals and clinics to satisfy people outraged at two-year waits for hip operations. Sweden has been privatizing. France and Germany are debating changes, says London-based health care analyst Helen Disney, in part because aging populations and generous promises have led to waiting lists and co-pays.

"You're starting to get consumer pressure from the ground up," Disney says. The European Union ruled a decade ago that countries must pay when their citizens travel to other EU countries for care, so people are skipping the waiting lists, subverting the usual cost control. Europeans still want taxes to pay for care, she says, but they want to be treated like customers. Governments, thus, are scrambling to imitate markets.

To inject a dose of reality into America’s domestic debate, five European health policy experts explained the nuts and bolts of how European health care systems work at a briefing for congressional staffers in Washington, D.C., jointly sponsored by the Heritage Foundation and the Galen Institute. Homegrown critics of America’s health care system "tend to go misty-eyed when thinking about the merits of European health care systems," says Helen Disney, director of the Stockholm Network. The performance is always less than the promise, she warned.

In America, patients and doctors often make medical decisions and thus demand the best-available diagnostic tools, procedures, and drugs. Affordability obviously plays its part, but the fact that most Americans either pay for themselves or carry various levels of insurance guarantees a market whose profits reward medical innovators.

Under socialized medicine, public officials administer a single budget and usually ration care among a population whose sole choice is to take whatever therapies the state monopoly provides.

“In a service that is free at the point of delivery, demand will always tend to outstrip supply,” explains David Smith. In Impatient for Change: European Attitudes to Healthcare Reform, published by the free-market Stockholm Network, he adds: “[R]ationing by waiting times or by the range of treatments on offer has been a regular feat