BRITAIN

BRITAIN

The Times, London, August 7: There is a truth about modern health care that, in the politics of the day, is consistently ignored. Demand will always beat supply.

That is because the demands we have of the service are now out of all alignment with our willingness to pay for them. There are more pensioners than there have been in any previous era and they are living to the ripe old ages at which they contract expensively treatable diseases. The innovative genius of health scientists has made more diseases treatable, usually with new drugs that are, at least initially, very expensive. It is not surprising that citizens demand all that can be done. In a public system, every citizen is sensitive to pain and insensitive to price.

Lifestyle choices

At the same time, health care is getting less effective at preventing conditions, such as obesity and its associated links with diabetes, that are the upshot of dietary and lifestyle choices. The National Health Service has never really been that. It is more of a national illness-fixing service. The health of the nation actually has rather little to do with the NHS and that poor correlation is getting worse, to costly effect.

These are serious problems, but the solutions are not hard to enumerate, even if they are difficult to swallow. We cannot afford all that we can do so health care will have to be rationed further. We can do this by price, by availability or by time. Patients can be charged for some services that are currently free; some elective and non-catastrophic services may have to be excluded from the core set of NHS interventions; or people will again have to get used to waiting a long time.

SWEDEN

Svenska Dagbladet, Aug 11: The Basque separatist group turns 50 this year and a perverse celebration is under way. ... (T)hree bombs were discovered in bars near the beach in Palma. This after a car bomb exploded on June 29, ... injuring 46 and after two police were killed in a bomb attack in Calvia on Mallorca.

Tourist areas

It has happened before that the terrorists have targeted tourist areas. But in combination with that they have also started to attack police families lately, this weekend’s warded off attack must be seen as an expression that the ETA violence could be on its way to change.

Unpleasantly, it is not completely unlikely that the terror, now to a higher extent than before will be directed directly at civilians.

The earlier conservative government put up a strong fight for several years, which triggered a serious attempt to assassinate former Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar. But the successor Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero naively believed it was possible to negotiate with the barrel of a gun, and therefore the government’s hold on the terror organization softened.

As such the Basque separatists will continue to be a problem for, and pose a threat to, Spaniards as well as to foreign tourists.

NORWAY

Dagsavisen, Aug. 12: (T)he Burmese regime extended Aung San Suu Kyi’s house arrest by 18 months. In total, the government has stolen 14 years of her freedom, and there is no guarantee that the regime will release her after she’s served this latest sentence. The trial was a farce from start to finish.

Struggle for freedom

Aung San Suu Kyi has become a symbol of the struggle for freedom — not only in Burma, but the world over. The international community must continue to put increasingly greater pressure on the Burmese regime to free her. British Prime Minister Gordon Brown has proposed a global ban on selling arms to Burma. The EU has warned that it may use “targeted measures” to punish those responsible for Monday’s ruling against Suu Kyi.