But why does the NHS obviously need more money?
A common enough assertion, here being made in The Observer:
One of the lessons of the impact of Covid-19 and the manifest long-term pressures on the health service is this: once the economy is on an even keel again, there will need to be an increase in taxation – probably, and appropriately, via national insurance – to finance the NHS properly.
Leave aside the current issues which we think very much overblown indeed. We have a health service to take care of our health. When we needed our health taken care of we had a health service to do so. Well, that’s good but why does that mean everything must change? Isn’t that why we went to the bother of having a health service in the first place?
Think instead of that longer term issue. Clearly, obviously, spending on the NHS must rise. But why?
The argument in favour of the state-led model - an argument routinely deployed by the likes of Polly Toynbee et al - is that it removes all that waste caused by competition and markets. That this misses the point entirely isn’t our point here. Let’s accept it for the moment. So, we have, in the NHS, a more efficient health care system than others who use those pesky markets models.
This means we should gain more health care for any specific amount of money, or the same amount for less money. That very argument in favour of the NHS proves that it should have a smaller budget than other systems precisely because it is more efficient.
Yet UK health care spending is near bang on EU average as a percentage of GDP. It’s above EU average in per capita terms and right about where it should be given relative GDP per capita.
We’re spending, that is, about what everyone else does in relative terms. If the NHS is more efficient then we should be gaining more and better health care than they do as a result of that spending. If we’re not - which is the common complaint, isn’t it? - then it must be that the NHS model isn’t more efficient and therefore that’s the thing, not the spending levels, that must change.
Either the NHS is better in which case it doesn’t need more money or if it needs more money then the NHS isn’t better.