It is a standard trope that cooperation is more effective, less costly, than competition. This is one of the reasons given as to why there shouldn’t be outsourcing or private provision in the National Health Service - it’s more expensive to do it that way.

We don’t agree with that contention in the slightest but we do have to deal with arguments as they’re presented to us. The NHS, precisely because it is the NHS, is more efficient than other methods of financing and providing health care. Well, if you say so:

We don’t have enough funding. For years, the UK has lagged behind other major economies in how much money we spend on healthcare. According to a 2019 study, when compared to other major western economies, we spend the lowest amount of money on healthcare per person and it shows.

If the NHS is the most efficient method then we should be gaining the same level of health care as other countries for less money spent than those other countries. In fact, the claim that we must be spending the same amount as them is an insistence that the NHS is not that more efficient method. Meaning that, if we are to accept the insistence upon level of spending then we get to examine the claims over the efficiency of structure. Perhaps, even, to include all those bits and pieces of private provision and competition that near all other health care systems include.

That is, despite the Prime Minister being all in favour of it, we must beware of cakeism. It is not possible both that the NHS is more efficient and that it needs the same amount of cash. Either or folks, either or.