Diverse healthcare provision is standard in other European countries. This is a lesson we should learn from our continental neighbours
The NHS is in crisis. Nearly 7.5 million people are on waiting lists, the highest figure since records began in 2007. There have been almost 100,000 more deaths of people with cardiovascular disease than expected since 2020. The junior doctors’ and consultants’ strikes remain unresolved.
But we may now be seeing the first tentative signs that the Government is coming up with creative ideas to reform healthcare. As this paper reported, ministers have announced that private sector healthcare providers will be brought on board to provide over 400,000 diagnostic scans, checks and tests each year. We need to go back to when Tony Blair was prime minister to last see such an expansion for the role of the private sector in the NHS.
Our political class remains in fear of discussing social insurance models for funding the health service, such as those successfully operating in France, Germany and the Netherlands. So long as it remains taboo to consider any alternative to an NHS funded through general taxation, the only way of breaking up this inefficient monolith, with its shameful outcomes, is to bring competition into the provision of healthcare.
Mr Blair, writing in The Daily Telegraph last month to mark the 75th anniversary of the NHS, called for a massive increase in private provision within the NHS. What is needed, he argued, are “new providers and new partnerships … where the incentives of funding and accountability are designed to encourage innovation. This must include active encouragement of new providers to enter the system, particularly for high-volume, low-complexity services, many of which can now be provided digitally.”