“Guten tag, Mr. Patient. Wie gehts?” — Another health care crisis for Britain’s NHS
That’s not normally what you expect to hear from your doctor, but you may hear that question in Hungarian or Polish or German or Italian or even Lithuanian if you’re a patient under Britain’s NHS. It turns out this problem arises because, yet again, the government has abandoned the rules of supply and demand in lieu of government mandated salaries that bear no relationship to the actual work done. In this case, after years of underpaying doctors, so that the supply of doctors dried up, Britain’s NHS went in the other direction and vastly overpays them, whether they work or not (emphasis mine):
The huge extent to which the NHS needs foreign doctors to treat patients out of hours is revealed today.
A third of primary care trusts are flying in GPs from as far away as Lithuania, Poland, Germany, Hungary, Italy and Switzerland because of a shortage of doctors in Britain willing to work in the evenings and at weekends.
The stand-ins earn up to £100 an hour, and one trust paid Polish and German doctors a total of £267,000 in a year, a Daily Mail investigation has found.
It raises fresh concerns that British patients are being treated by exhausted doctors without a perfect command of English.
[snip]
The figures come months after an investigation was launched into the conduct of a German doctor after two patients died on his first shift in Britain.
Daniel Ubani [himself Nigerian, but resident in Germany] had just three hours sleep after travelling from Germany before he went on duty in Cambridgeshire.
[snip]
The NHS is having to rely on doctors from overseas because a lucrative new contract for British GPs has resulted in more than 90 per cent opting out of responsibility for their patients in the evenings and at weekends.
Despite doing less, their pay has soared by 50 per cent to an average of almost £108,000
You can read the rest here, but it’s another reminder, as if we need one, that governments seldom understand either market forces or human nature.
