health economics

i was talking to sarah-lou the other day, and she told me some interesting things about health in britain:

1) all doctors of an equal seniority get paid the same - so the internist gets as much as the pediatrician gets as much as the plastic surgeon

2) staff docs (called consultants) don't get paid that much! apparently a starting consultant might only make something like 80,000 pounds a year

3) waiting times are much less - hip replacements apparently won't ever take more than 3 months and the maximum permissible waiting time by law in emerg is 4 hours from entry to being seen by a physician

i'm not sure how they manage the waiting times thing, since they don't spend more on healthcare per capita than canadians do, but damn wouldn't it be lovely if we had that too?