If we give the NHS £20billion without cutting its waste, our taxes will go up in years to come
Mrs May has given the money but, as the pressures mount, the NHS will need more and more and more - from our taxes
A BILLION pounds wasted on missed appointments.
Bills of £1,579 for a £2 pot of moisturiser. Medical malpractice payouts that are twice as high, per capita, as those in America. Billions more wasted on agency staff, management consultants, waste and mismanagement.
For politicians, the NHS has become the third rail of politics — touch it and die.
Yet as the health service prepares to celebrate its 70th birthday, it is clear things cannot go on as they are.
We talk and talk about money. But it is time to start talking about how the NHS actually spends it.
The Prime Minister has announced this week that she is giving the health service a significant budget increase. It will certainly need it as the population ages. For the first time in Britain’s history, over-65s are starting to outnumber under-18s — and the imbalance is set to grow.
But Theresa May has also called on the NHS to come up with a plan to spend it well — to tackle waste, bureaucracy and the variation in standards that makes healthcare such a lottery for millions of ordinary Britons.
I am glad Mrs May has listened to those of us who have called for a long-term financial settlement for the NHS. It was brave of her to ignore those who argue that the best thing the Conservatives can do about the NHS is shut up about it, because it is a Labour issue.
The fact is the NHS is something that affects us all. And it is in all of our interests to make sure it works as well as it can.
Yes, we feel great pride as a country in its work. But we should feel shame at the many ways in which it still lets down patients — which often have nothing to do with the amount of money spent.
Talk to anyone in the NHS and they will tell you all kinds of ways in which it could and should be doing better.
Research by the Centre for Policy Studies has shown that previous funding increases — most notoriously the great spending splurge under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown — have not been matched by performance. The more the health service gets, the less effectively it tends to spend.
So I am urging Mrs May to seize a historic opportunity. To go down in history not as the Prime Minister who patched up the NHS for a few years, but a second Attlee, who put it on a sustainable path for the next 70.
Despite the bad press it has often received, the Government has done a creditable job of keeping the NHS patient stable. Funding has risen, in real terms, year after year.
But any 70-year-old is bound to be showing their age — especially one that has been subjected, as the NHS has, to quite so many bouts of painful surgery, many of which have created as many problems as they cured.
Given the vital importance of this issue, it should not just be up to NHS leaders to come up with a plan to satisfy Mrs May’s demands for greater efficiency. We need a cross-party Royal Commission that can carry out a root and branch review of how it operates, how it is funded — and how we could be doing things better.
For example, the public tell pollsters the Government should definitely be spending more on the NHS. But they tell the same pollsters they are already feeling too much pain in their pockets.
And if you suggest there might be sensible ways to get more money into the NHS without raising taxes, for example, by charging for missed appointments, you are howled down.
We have been clear that the fundamental and inspiring principles of the NHS must be respected and preserved. But what is evident is denying that the NHS needs reform is, in itself, an immoral act.
Compared with its international rivals, the NHS lets too many people die of heart attacks and strokes. Our survival rates for cancer victims are at the bottom of the league table, alongside Chile and Poland. And we all know the failure to transfer patients seamlessly between health care and social care is having calamitous consequences for millions of elderly patients, and for the NHS as a whole.
As our research shows, reform is just as important as funding, arguably even more so. The gap between an NHS that matches its best efficiency ratings over the past two decades, and one that lives down to its worst, is cavernous, the equivalent in improved productivity of recruiting hundreds of thousands more staff, and carrying out millions more operations.
Mrs May has given the NHS the money. But in years to come, as the pressures mount, the NHS will need more and more and more, much, if not all of it, from our taxes. What we need now is a long-term effort to evaluate the problems the NHS faces, and devise solutions to them, outside of party politics — and with the full engagement of the public.
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When Mrs May became Prime Minister she gave a stirring address about her mission to resolve unfairness and injustice.
It is unjust and unfair that so much NHS spending is wasted, and that so many get poor treatment through no fault of their own — or of their hard-working doctors and nurses.
That is why it is so urgent that Mrs May now moves the agenda on from short-term fix to long-term cure.
- Lord Saatchi is Chairman of the Centre for Policy Studies and author of An NHS Royal Commission: From Fighting Fires to Lasting Settlement.