Word: britains
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...only does the equation make hard-nosed sense in a public-health system, its use can reduce costs in other ways. Eager to gain NICE's approval, drug companies have started giving away portions of expensive treatment for free in Britain in order to ensure their drugs meet the threshold. Sir Michael Rawlins, chairman of NICE, believes that if the U.S. adopted a similar system, it would revolutionize the culture of major pharmaceutical companies, many of which spend more on marketing than research and development. A 2008 study in the New England Journal of Medicine predicted that incorporating information about...
...generally high level of care for even the most vulnerable. All French citizens have affordable access to a doctor, thanks in part to one of the highest rates of doctors per capita in the world (3.4 per 1,000, compared to 2.4 in the U.S. and 2.5 in Britain). A sick French citizen who stays inside the public funding system might not get to choose from a list of specialists, but he or she will get a referral and the needed care. In some cases, patients even get paid to go to the doctor: for new mothers, a network...
More than 100 years before the French and American revolutions, a series of convulsions in Britain built the essentials of the modern democratic state. A civil war, and then what was termed "the Glorious Revolution," established the constitutional primacy of Parliament - a body whose principal chamber is accountable to, and removable by, the popular will, expressing itself in periodic elections. A "parliamentary democracy" is how Britain describes itself, with both pride and, occasionally, condescension for those (as they say) in less happy lands...
Right now, neither pride nor condescension is the order of the day. Revelations of the tawdry behavior of modern MPs - expensing everything from improvements to second homes to their spouse's porn - have led to popular outrage in Britain and claimed the scalp of the Speaker of the House of Commons, a supposedly above-the-fray symbol of Parliament's reputation. The scandal has exposed what anyone who has spent time in the House of Commons knows well; that many of its members are has-beens and never-will-bes, self-important rhetoricians inebriated (as one truly great parliamentarian said...
...British - and those such as Americans who, knowingly or not, trace their own systems of government to the ones the British established - had not taken it upon themselves of late to lecture the rest of the world on the wonders of democracy. The great men of 17th century Britain knew better. Forever arguing, disputing, pamphleteering, they were tormented by their own imperfections and those of the messy designs upon which they somehow built a functioning state. Humility, admission of error, a recognition that no form of government is without fault or compromise - these are the values that democrats once avowed...