Health care tops British political debate

Editor's note: Erick Harris, a graduate of Central High School, is spending a semester in London for an internship in Parliament and is writing about his experiences.

Lively political debate was in full swing last week as the two top parties focused on differences in their health-care plans and policies. Last Wednesday, during Prime Minister's Questions, Conservative leader Michael Howard created a "Skutnik moment" that the media has been focused on ever since. The clamor began when Howard, in a similar fashion to Al Gore in the 2000 presidential debates, described a pensioner who had been denied a crucial operation on seven occasions. After his story, Howard asked, "can the prime minister explain how, after eight years of his government, all the money they have spent on the NHS [National Health Service] and all the promises they have made, that can happen in Britain today?"

This question alone most likely would not have created much of a media frenzy, but Prime Minister Tony Blair's angry and heated response caused the media to highlight it over and again. It turns out that the example of this pensioner is just one of 67,000 such cases in the last year.

In the course of the debate surrounding health care, the Liberal Democrat party leader Charles Kennedy has, for good reason, opted to stay out of this political war between the Conservative and Labour parties. In an effort to improve waiting times the Liberal Democrats propose an increased earmark to the NSH. To pay for it, they propose to tax all those who make £100,000 or more. Every pound over that amount would be taxed at a rate of 50 percent.

Blair maintains that the funding for the NHS has been spent efficiently. In Prime Minister's Questions, Blair claimed that approximately one million patients are treated every 36 hours under the current government. The Labour Party proposes to increase NHS spending to 9.4 percent of the total national income.

Conversely, Howard claims that spending toward the NHS is already high and is getting wasted in bureaucracies. He claims that the number of patients paying to get treated in private health facilities has tripled under the current Labour government. Howard proposes to provide cleaner hospitals by allowing them to administer themselves by abolishing independent agencies.

According to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, the United Kingdom spends approximately 43 percent of its gross domestic product on health-care services as compared to the United States' 36 percent. The difference is due to the amount of health care provided by each respective government. Though health care is free in the UK, it is difficult to receive adequate care for critical operations like the one described by Howard. The BBC reports that the United States has 24 critical care beds for every 100,000 citizens, whereas the UK has only four.

I think that Howard's focus on a particular example is a positive step in working toward a solution to the United Kingdom's healthcare conundrum. It puts the discussion in back rooms of Westminster and on the television sets of Britons at home. Either way, I am optimistic that the solution which flows from the discussion will reform health care so that those who need it most can receive it when they need it.

Erick Harris attends Vanderbilt University in Nashville.