Freedom Line Blog

I wonder if new British Prime Minister David Cameron offered any words of fiscal wisdom to President Barack Obama during the two leaders’ first meet-and-greet since assuming power.  If he did, Cameron should have pointed out that adopting an “austerity” budget program need not be code for lack of creativity.

Under a recently announced plan to decentralize much of the National Health Service (NHS), Cameron’s Coalition Government of Conservative and Liberal Democrats plans to “shift control of England’s $160 billion annual health care budget from a centralized bureaucracy to doctors at the local level,” reports the New York Times.  “Under the plan, $100 billion to $125 billion a year would be meted out to general practitioners, who would use the money to buy services from hospitals and other health care providers.”

Already one of the chief criticisms is that eliminating several layers of bureaucracy will cause several layers of bureaucrats to lose their jobs.

To which the Coalition responds, “And…?”   Britons realize that it’s time to make government spending fit within government budgets.  If the NHS is about health care for all – and not bureaucratic full employment – then it’s time to give patients and taxpayers the most value (and discretion) for their money.

If President Obama really wants to impose a stateside version of the NHS on Americans the least he could do is give the soon-to-be nationalized doctors the ultimate say in how they treat their patients.  Doing that would not only give doctors an incentive to stay in the profession, it would also drive up demand for entrepreneurs to fill in their business knowledge gaps with services to manage their new workload.

That sounds like a job-creating business opportunity to me; even if it is born more from government regulations rather than a purely free market need.  In the current political climate, though, it would be an improvement.