The Patriot Post® · In Britain, Socialism Gets in the Way of Health Care

The United Kingdom’s socialized health care system is putting its own interests ahead of the wellbeing of the people it’s supposed to serve. This week, the UK’s National Health Service (NHS) announced that it would not okay PrEP as a prophylactic drug to prevent the transmission of HIV among sexually active homosexual men. And though the United States has been using the practice to slow the spread of the disease, NHS couldn’t think past its own wellbeing. The organization wrote, “Including PrEP for consideration in competition with specialised commissioning treatments … could present risk of legal challenge from proponents of other ‘candidate’ treatments and interventions that could be displaced by PrEP if NHS England were to commission it.” In other words, NHS was so afraid that a big pharma company might sue them for not giving them preferential treatment in the system that they didn’t consider this drug that’s already proven to work and work well. Hello, cronyism.

“It is very much an important reminder than under a socialized medicine system, you are no longer the customer,” writes Reason’s Scott Shackford. “Some very naïve supporters of nationalized healthcare have gotten it into their heads that government-controlled services eliminate corruption and profiteering in the medical system. That couldn’t be further from the truth.” And yet, by setting us down the path of ObamaCare, the Obama administration has created a system that will eventually be more interested in self preservation than providing quality health care. Already, ObamaCare has caused the health care industry to grow while the overall access and affordability to care has declined.