When you consider the years America spent debating health care reform from the last presidential campaign to passage of the bill, it is startling to read that Britain may plan to change its National Health Service to put decision-making at the local level just like that.

This plan also is expected to cut costs and will eliminate jobs.

They elect their leaders quickly. We shall see how quickly Brits reform their National Health Service—or if they are unable to.

The New York Times

“Even as the new coalition government said it would make enormous cuts in the public sector, it initially promised to leave health care alone. But in one of its most surprising moves so far, it has done the opposite, proposing what would be the most radical reorganization of the National Health Service, as the system is called, since its inception in 1948.

“Practical details of the plan are still sketchy. But its aim is clear: to shift control of England’s $160 billion annual health budget from a centralized bureaucracy to doctors at the local level. 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 “The plan would also shrink the bureaucratic apparatus, in keeping with the government’s goal to effect $30 billion in “efficiency savings” in the health budget by 2014 and to reduce administrative costs by 45 percent. Tens of thousands of jobs would be lost because layers of bureaucracy would be abolished.”

Source: New York Times, July 24, 2010