Nhs

Monday

James Forsyth

An untrumpeted change

John Rentoul rightly flags up the story in this morning’s FT that about 100,000 NHS patients have gone private and had the state pick up the tab, the private hospitals have had to agree to do the work at the NHS price. For those of us who would like to see the NHS move towards a model where the state pays for healthcare but it is provided by a whole panoply of providers, this is an encouraging step. This kind of consumer-focused reform is hard to reverse. The story, as John notes, hasn’t got as much coverage as it should. John blames this on the press’s lack of interest in

Wednesday

Alex Massie

School Choice in a Single Sentence

Matt Yglesias makes the point in splendid fashion: We should let a thousand flowers bloom and then kill 20-30 percent of them if they turn out to look ugly. Exactly. Logically, mind you, this is how we might approach other policy questions. In Britain, that might mean welcoming regional variation in the NHS (Oh noes! Not the Postcode Lottery!) and treating that as a feature, not a bug. Then we could learn from each other and see what works best in any given set of circumstances. Centrifugal* forces are your friend, not the enemy. *Typo corrected.

Thursday

James Forsyth

The NHS isn't free

If we are going to have a sensible debate about the NHS in this country, we need to deal with the myth that the NHS is free. Yes, the NHS is free at the point of use, but we all pay for it through taxation. I suspect that slightly fewer people would still ‘love the NHS’ if they knew precisely how much they were contributing towards its costs through all the taxes that they pay. I say this as someone who has no desire to import the US system. Before I went to live in the States, I was quite a fan of the US healthcare system. But having lived

Fraser Nelson

Finally, a stroke of good luck for Gordon Brown

This UK-US spat over the NHS has spilled over into a snowballing twitter campaign, with comments flooding in from Brits. Nigel Lawson said the NHS was like a religion to Britain, and many have come to defend the faith. Brown has lent his support to the campaign, and it’s perfect for him. It allows him to play the patriotic card, telling those yanks (especially – boo – the conservative ones who watch Fox news, and their neocon supporters like Class Enemy Hannan) where to shove it. He also gives President Obama – he of Obama Beach fame – some political support. Finally, it allows him to claim that the NHS

Monday

Alex Massie

Stephen Hawking Has Not Yet Been Murdered by the NHS

There are, I think, two essential truths in international health policy. No-one sees fit to copy the National Health Service and no-one sees fit to copy the American system. Still, for all that we need NHS reform (hardly a surprise since just about every health system is under strain and needs tweaking), the picture of the NHS given by some of the people opposed to Obama’s health plans is, well, not hugely accurate. Take, for instance, this Investors Business Daily editorial which claims that: People such as scientist Stephen Hawking wouldn’t have a chance in the U.K., where the National Health Service would say the life of this brilliant man,