Articles Tagged ‘Great Britain’

IMF Warns Britain to Dump ‘Free’ Healthcare to Avoid Financial Crisis

Friday, October 2nd, 2009

Britain’s vaunted nationalized healthcare system is bankrupting the nation and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) is warning that if the UK doesn’t start charging for healthcare and raise the retirement age above 65 the country will not be able to get out from under the widening fiscal disaster.

The IMF is telling the British government that she must instigate a wholesale revamping of its pensioner and healthcare system to “help keep a lid on the debt.”

Treasury officials admitted recently that the deficit is expected to rise “£200billion this year - £25billion more than the Chancellor predicted in the Budget.”

That is the equivalent of £3,257 of debt for every man, woman and child, or £9,457 for the average family.

It should be pointed out that Britain’s deficit is no where near the Obama deficit in the U.S. and his $1 debt doesn’t even count any nationalized healthcare plan like the one Congress is desperately trying to pass.

When Life Imitates “Seinfeld”: Doggie care in the UK

Monday, August 10th, 2009

Originated from statehousecall.org

By John LaPlante

Over the weekend, the Wall Street Journal published an article by Theodore Dalrymple, who compared human health care to doggie care, and found that the pets have certain advantages, which reminds one blogger of an episode of Seinfeld.

Dalrymple has several other worthwhile observations in the rest of his column, too many to list here, including thoughts on health care in France, European freeloading on American health care, charitable dog care, and health economics: “Health economics, after all, is an important and very complex science, if a somewhat dull one, indeed the most dismal branch of the dismal science.”

On the sometimes unpleasant conditions in Britain’s National Health Service, he says: “oddly enough, one of the things about the British National Health Service for human beings that has persuaded the British over its 60 years of existence that it is socially just is the difficulty and unpleasantness it throws in the way of patients, rich and poor alike: for equality has the connotation not only of justice, but of hardship and suffering.”