The NHS is our national religion – but there’s no miracle funding cure | Frank Field It’s time for a Bevan-type reform of health finances – the public would make greater NI contributions into a ringfenced mutual organisation to secure the NHS’s future.
The NHS is the one postwar act to which the public are committed. It has become, in Nigel Lawson’s indicative phrase, Britain’s national religion. That is why politicians invariably play safe, knowing that the gods can most easily be assuaged with offerings of money. Yet the gods are getting more and more demanding and we live in an age of public austerity.
It must be doubted if the government believes its own rhetoric on safeguarding the NHS budget in real terms. NHS inflation is higher than the government calculates, the older we get as a nation the greater our health demands, and modern technology feeds that demand. So is the solution simply more money? The answer is an emphatic “yes”, but in assuaging the gods we need to change fundamentally the politics of health. Continue reading... The Guardian
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