Wednesday 20 June 2012

A rusty super-tanker lumbers on

Mike Farrar of the NHS Confederation [1] says:

The NHS is like a super-tanker heading for an iceberg. The danger is clearly in view and looming ever larger.

Super-tanker is right! Super-sized, loaded with inertia, and impossible to steer.

But having recognised the nature of the beast, Mr Farrar suggests we steam ever faster ahead.

It is frankly absurd to suggest that important services can only be maintained by increasing spending even faster than the Coalition government has planned. After 13 years of New Labour bureaucratic expansion, there is plenty of fat to be trimmed, and the NHS provides plenty of non-essential procedures, from gender reassignment to IVF.

Even our Soviet-style healthcare system would be sustainable if properly managed, but it seems that today's politicians lack the resolve to reject idiotic demands from the Guardian and the BBC.

Far better, though, to let the free market work its magic. We don't have a National Food Service. Why do we need a National Health Service.

[1] "the membership body for the full range of organisations that commission and provide NHS services" - nicely unbiased, then.

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