The British are debating ways to reform the National Health Service. But politicians have found there is one strategy that will not stand: Americanization.

Jimmy Henry Chu writes for the Los Angeles Times:

Britain is now embroiled in a healthcare argument of its own, prompted by a proposed shake-up of the NHS. And the phrase on everyone’s lips is “American-style,” which may not be as catchy as the “death panels” that Palin attributed to socialized medicine but which, over here, inspires pretty much the same kind of terror.

Ask a Briton to describe “American-style” healthcare, and you’ll hear a catalog of horrors that include grossly expensive and unnecessary medical procedures and a privatized system that favors the rich. For a people accustomed to free healthcare for all, regardless of income, the fact that millions of their cousins across the Atlantic have no insurance and can’t afford decent treatment is a farce as well as a tragedy. …

… So frightening is the Yankee example that any British politician who values his job has to explicitly disavow it as a possible outcome. Twice.

The Brits are worried that some proposals amount to back-door privatization, which would put Britain on the road to American-style serfdom. What the article doesn’t point out is that Britain spends a great deal less on health care than the U.S. does, as explained in a recent post. Total spending is $3,129 per capita in Britain and $7,538 per capita in the U.S. Or, as a percentage of GDP, Britain spends 8.7 percent and the U.S. spends 16 percent.

That privatization is somethin’ else, huh?

Ironically, government spending on health care as a percentage of GDP is nearly the same in the two countries — 7.4 percent in the U.S., 7.2 percent in the U.K. But then the U.S. is burdened by its big, sloppy, wasteful, profit-driven private health care industry that is eating our economy on top of that.

The British NHS does have a lot of problems, but it also is on the low end of what industrialized nations spend on health care. There are all kinds of factors driving up health care cost that are impacting most nations. The only country I know of getting by with lower costs figured both per capita and as a percentage of GDP is Japan. I don’t know how Japan is keeping its costs down, but it is.

BTW, there is also grumbling about Americanizing the higher education system. Public universities are raising tuition fees as high as $14,750 a year — a bargain by our standards — and the Brits are angry about this. They don’t think higher education should require such a financial burden. Just wait ’til some British genius comes up with a student loan industry.