Tories and sacred cows

12 April 2012

Like a small boy caught smoking behind the bicycle sheds, the Tory shadow Health Secretary, Dr Liam Fox, has been dragged shamefacedly into the open to confess that he has been putting together a policy to bring private money into the NHS. It is well known that for months the Tories have been studying European models of funding national health care. At last now there are signs that they are ready to challenge Labour with the increasingly evident truth, that taxpayers' pockets are not deep enough to fund the NHS from taxation alone. They have a sound response to the Prime Minister's loaded question: "Do we build up our NHS through investment and reform, or do we run it down, charge people for care, force people to go private as the Conservatives want?? Wednesday's Budget statement ought to be the perfect occasion for the Tories to propose their potentially vote-catching alternative to the Chancellor's taxraising. If Mr Gordon Brown runs true to form, his tax hike "to pay for the NHS? will be smaller than he has softened up the public to expect, but on top of his increase so far in the overall tax burden - roughly 1.8 per cent of GDP, representing £18 billion - it will nevertheless be a substantial sum, given his determination to raise the level of NHS funding to the European average. The difference is that the Europeans all help finance that funding both with higher levels of private health insurance and with mandatory contributions into social insurance funds - best explained as a small downpayment every time we see the doctor. A taxpayer-funded system is more equitable insofar as the healthy pay for the unhealthy, but less equitable in that the overstretched NHS scores badly across a range of international health indicators, such as waiting lists and cancer survival rates, thus enabling the rich to get much better treatment than the rest. The public desperately need a proper debate on the NHS, which the Government has effectively tried to close. The Tories desperately need a vote-winning initiative which New Labour will not steal from them. For the first time in years the Tories have something to say that the public wants to listen to.

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