>We have to invest more in identifying and tackling disease earlier if we want to “stop the hospitals from falling over and the GPs from being overwhelmed,” he said.

Demographics and shrinking labor forces alone will bring the system to its knees regardless of money. It's absolutely baffling in the face of this trend that preventative, systemic policies are practically never discussed and everything centers around individual care.

Countries like Singapore show how you can tackle this, strong interventions to prevent entire populations from being obese, a regulated medical sector to bring costs down and private savings funds to encourage personal responsibilty.

I think it’s amazing that a solid system can be defunded like that until it just sorta crumbles under it’s own weight. There’s no immediate solution either.

If you build more hospitals, you need more staff, if you need more staff, you need to make it more attractive, but even if you do you need several years before the first doctors/nurses from the wave with renewed interest in the position finishes university.

And that’s only if there is any political will to do so.

Nearly every country is now suffering from the age demographic bomb where senior retirees are starting to outnumber working adults.

https://www.epbmacroresearch.com/blog/the-global-demographic...

This has major implications for many social safety net programs and entitlements ie there aren’t enough working adults paying into the system, which is also exacerbated by recent anti immigration movements which was a major cause for the UK leaving the EU.

This story is now common in many developed countries that offer socialized healthcare.

It's intriguing that medical care is always the worst kind of service, by far, in every country in the developed world, compared to every other kind of product or service we depend on. Compare it to food, electricity, gasoline, clothing, water, cell service, haircuts, transportation, movies. If you're not in a rural location, you can buy food or a restaurant meal 24-hours a day in less than an hour. There's complex infrastructure and supply chains around food production, but it works, and works fast. But you can't start most medical treatment without waiting days, weeks, or even months. In lots of places you can't even see a family physician or primary care doctor without waiting days.

Why is it? It is because medical care is more "personalized" and less of a commodity? Because it's heavily controlled by government? Is it the liability (medical people can get sued for a lot more than a bad haircut)? Due to much higher expectations of what is acceptable medical care compared to, say, food?

It doesn't seem obvious to me why the economics of medical care should be so different than everything else we use and depend on.

Isn't this true just about everywhere? Someone who lives in a major urban area is going to have more prompt access to advanced emergency healthcare than someone who lives in a remote rural area, simply due to factors such as travel time, and the clinical need to physically concentrate specialist medical resources (specialist clinical teams need a certain minimum case volume to properly maintain their skills, and if you try to spread them too thinly, you can actually worsen patient outcomes)–but that inevitably means that some people in remote rural areas will die before they get the treatment they need, whereas they may well have survived if they'd lived in a major urban area instead. Inefficiencies and inequities in healthcare systems can no doubt worsen this phenomena, but even if you could have the most efficient and equitable healthcare system possible, it would still inevitably happen, even if to a somewhat reduced degree.

The only countries which can totally avoid this problem, are those that are so small that the whole country is a single major urban area, and "remote rural areas" either don't exist at all, or are such a minuscule percentage of the population as to be a statistical rounding error – so basically city-states such as Singapore, Monaco or Vatican City

This website has the least pleasant scrolling experience I've ever seen

https://archive.is/bLbiA

Which country has the best health care in Europe? And what makes it the best solution?

I ask from the perspective of an American, with access to great health care but it’s expensive. If we were going to reinvent health care here, who should we copy?

Counterpoint to all the "it's because it's underfunded" arguments: The money's there, it's just misspent, as with all government lead bureaucracies, resulting in service that could and does kill.

There are multiple unnecessary levels of bureaucracy being paid, leaving little room for people who do actual work. This also results in those people being stifled by busy work.

Source: Doctors I'm friends with, and personal experience (with family members dying or permanently and seriously damaged).

Canada doesnt have these kinds of issues with its universal healthcare. We have pioneered new processes to reduce the burden to our medical system [1].

[1] https://www.justice.gc.ca/eng/cj-jp/ad-am/bk-di.html

It's England... bring out your dead. https://youtu.be/zEmfsmasjVA