Jun 07 2007
The bed shortage - more evidence that monopolies do not work
I am glad many agree with me that the NHS has cut its bed numbers by too much - and yes I agree this has happened under both parties in power.
My critics confuse two things - monopoly, and who pays. I am against monopoly, as it invariably delivers less for more??with worse quality.I am not in favour of making the??less well off??pay for their own health care. Like most people in?? the UK debate I do believe in transferring money to the less well off by one means or another. It is usually better to let people have choice of how they spend this money, or at least to have choice of which doctor/school etc??to use, than to make the transfer through the supply of monopoly goods and services. We do not make the poor go to a state supermarket to obtain a rationed supply of state food from a limited list of items. We give them extra income so they can go to the supermarkets we all use. In health care we let the rich choose where to go for healthcare, but make all the rest of us go to the??monopoly provider. I welcome moves to offer??a wider range of health facilities, and to give us choice on how to spend the NHS money that we rely on.
It is no coincidence that the things we are short of - hospital beds, train tracks, roadspace,good school places,NHS dentists are all state monopolies. We have no shortage of hotel beds, ferries, cars and lorries, or private sector dentists.
John Redwood has been the Member of Parliament for Wokingham since 1987. First attending Kent College, Canterbury, he graduated from Magdalen College...
It’s hard to disagree with most of this. But choice should not lead to a difference in quality of provision received by the poor and the rest of us. To take the supermarket analogy - it really does not matter if I can afford fillet steak whilst my neighbour can only afford mince, both can be used to cook healthy nutritious food; but it does matter if I can afford the latest cancer drug when my neighbour can not. When pushing for choice we must guard against the public services becoming a bargain basement of minimum provision which everyone except the very poor tops up with their own money to a greater or lesser extent depending upon their income.
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Hi John,
You make a good point (as ever), but the NHS has been citing falling bed numbers as a SUCCESS story for years (it apparently means that the system is treating patients ever more efficiently).
It isn’t the first time that this “wisdom” has been questioned - doctors complained about it recently - but we’re a long way from seeing it cease to prevail.
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I’m sure it is no coincidence whatsoever, I would love to see some proper radical thinking on healthcare reform. The NHS has served us well since it started if we are honest, I have used it a few times and always received good service. However, the speed of medical progress, the politicisation of the post code lottery, growth in access to the media and new-media such as wikipedia and the resulting increased expectations means we do need to sit down and thrash out what we believe the best direction is for the new century. I think it was a (now unpopular with the leadership) Labour MP who once said that we need to ‘think the unthinkable’ about benefits. I think that for the good of everyone in the UK we need to think along the privatisation route with the NHS. We have been becoming richer as a nation since it started, now many large employers offer cheap or free private healthcare as standard just as a method of minimising recruitment and retention costs. I’m only on
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