Will there be Pay Sweeteners for US Doctors to ensure their critical support for a Health Care Overhaul Bill?

See taragana blog.

When Britain's NHS started in 1948 there was a similar fix. - "I stuffed their mouths with gold," said Aneurin Bevan, one of the most important ministers of the post-war Labour government and the chief architect of the National Health Service, speaking of the only way in which he had been able to silence the protests of the consultants who might otherwise have strangled the NHS at birth.

Well Britain's doctors are still grossly overpaid and are for all practical purposes unaccountable to the patients whom nominally they serve, because the NHS complaints procedures are in practice an exercise in futility and exhaustion for complainants. Yet despite all the 'gold' lavished on the doctors, we have an extremely poor health service. - Added to poor service, many of our once-clean hospitals are now dirty, and patients fear to go into them in case they catch one of the hospital acquired infections...

Patients experience very little benefit despite huge increases in cash for the NHS.

Patients miss out as NHS cash floods in

Extract:

"Billions of pounds of taxpayers' money pumped into the National Health Service has gone on improving the salaries of GPs and consultants and paying for increased pensions rather than on improvements in patient care and frontline services.

A damning report by the highly respected health think-tank, the King's Fund, reveals that productivity in the health service has actually declined, despite the huge injection of cash.

The report reveals that only 30 pence in every pound of the Government's record NHS budget has been aimed at directly improving patient care. As well as salaries, the rest has gone on a growing bill for clinical negligence payouts and rising drug costs."

Patients seem to come last in importance for the NHS. Doctors' pay and drug company profits seem to be the priorities.