Today’s quote of the day is also someone else’s quote of the day, in this case it’s the quote of the day on the Samizdata blog. It concerns the problems and pitfalls that come with having a state run healthcare service and is by Friedrich Hayek the philosopher and economist. I’m very grateful for the Samizdata blog for putting this up as it explains just what is wrong with Britain’s National Health Service and why I will not applaud this terrible and awful organisation.

The quote reads:

“There are so many serious problems raised by the nationalisation of medicine that we cannot mention even all the more important ones. But there is one the gravity of which the public has scarcely yet perceived and which is likely to be of the greatest importance. This is the inevitable transformation of doctors, who have been members of a free profession primarily responsible to their patients, into paid servants of the state, officials who are necessarily subject to instruction by authority and who must be released from the duty of secrecy so far as authority is concerned. The most dangerous aspect of the new development may well prove to be that, at a time when the increase in medical knowledge tends to confer more and more power over the minds of men to those who possess it, they should be made dependent on a unified organisation under single direction and be guided by the same reasons of state that generally govern policy.”

This is bang on when it comes to diagnosing just what is wrong with nationalised healthcare. Prior to the creation of the NHS, although doctors were employed either directly by the patent or via charities, local authorities, insurance companies or religious orders, their primary loyalty and primary customer was the patient. Whilst they may have been paid from different sources, charitable, religious, private, municipal or by way of insurance, their primary responsibility was to the patients for whom they were in charge.

This is no longer the case. Where once doctors were free agents, able to work for whom they wanted and treat whoever they wanted and build successful working relationships with patients, now they have but one, enforced, loyalty and that is to the State. With doctors having their primary responsibility to the State they have lost their primary responsibility to their patients. We who have the misfortune to be in countries where the State has a virtual monopoly on healthcare, get the healthcare that the State says we can have not the healthcare that we need or which a doctor may wish to provide. The doctors in nations such as the UK are as much in chains and lacking in choices as the rest of us are. This is a situation that I would like to see changed and have the patient in charge not the State.