What people like about the NHS is the promise of care free at the point of use. No-one in modern political parties in the UK is saying take that away. Most of us??are?? children of the NHS and support the social insurance that lies behind it.

I am not sure??people are so keen on - or hung up on - nationalised hospitals. Most of my constituents are very relaxed about?? whether their NHS treatment comes from the local GP surgery, the local NHS hospital, or a modern private treatment centre working on an NHS contract. People want the best, and they want it delivered in a timely and convenient way.

I am saying that to do this we need more variety of provision, and more choice for patients on the advice of their GPs. Monopolies don’t work well. Monopoly hospitals serving ever larger areas and bigger populations are not the??only model.If we want to tackle the bed shortage, and the District General Hospitals won’t deliver the extra beds, then we need to look elsewhere, as the government is beginning to do.

We do need to remind people that every adult is paying on average more than ??2000 a year for the NHS. That’s a lot of money over a lifetime. Those big payments should give us more rights to choose and influence what we are getting for it.

Many of the comparisons between the UK and the US system fail to take into account all the costs of the UK system. For example, they usually leave out all the costs of raising the tax revenue in the UK, whilst including all the costs of collecting the premiums in the USA. One of the biggest costs of the NHS is the Inland Revenue.

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