[A dilemma--public health care]

The financing of personal health care services has become the crucible to test elected governments in the 21st century. Governments are caught between slow economic growth, lower personal income for most workers, and the clamour of health care for more money. The Western world with an aging population, marginal employment and rising unemployment, does not appear to have the capacity to pay for all that science and technology can produce and the public wants. Neither private nor public financing seem to have developed the machinery to identify need, and to balance demand with national economic output. I wish to suggest, that although the countries in the industrialised world have travelled different routes we have arrived at the same place. The art and science of medicine coupled with the human quest for health may simply exceed our productive capacity. The organisation and financing of twenty-First Century science and technology is nearly dysfunctional, bound by Nineteenth Century values, traditions and custom, as we face the next century. This may be the question.