Well, if you start with an incorrect assumption....

Starting with an incorrect assumption does rather mean that the conclusion reached is going to have problems in being correct. So it is with this from Simon Wren Lewis. Leave aside all his claims about austerity and so on and concentrate just upon this:

…a healthy NHS needs to grow faster than GDP to cope with an ageing population, technological change and other well known factors.

Note what happens according to this, over time the NHS becomes an ever larger part of the economy and, eventually, the economy becomes nothing but the NHS.

Now it’s true that health care is a luxury good, something that we tend to spend more of our incomes upon as our incomes rise but that’s not the claim being made here. Rather, the insistence is that even with static incomes our health care spending should and must rise.

The incorrect part of this being the idea that technological change means an increase in costs. Of course it doesn’t, the impact is the other way around. The only reason to ever adopt new tech is that it’s more efficient than the old way of doing things - that is, for a particular outturn, it’s cheaper.

Another way to make the same point is that new tech increases productivity. Or at least should and if it isn’t there’s something very wrong with the institution trying to apply it.

That is, it could be true that the NHS should gain ever more money because that’s how we want to spend our money. But it’s not true, entirely the opposite is in fact true, that advancing technology means the NHS requires ever more rivers of cash. For the only reason to adopt a new technology is because, for the same outcome, it’s cheaper.