our own system

I think we should all just go ahead and acknowledge that no matter how the macro-economic healthcare resources are distributed or the system through which they are delivered will ever reach an ideal state.

Okay?

That said, we shouldn’t ever stop trying to reach it—even with different definitions of what exactly that ideal state may be. The flux of it all is the engine of its progress.

To that end, what’s being proposed for England’s National Health Service may provide an interesting example to learn, or run, from.

Read about it at The New York Times. From the article:

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 hospitals and other health care providers.

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.

Intriguing.