NHS Reform: towards consensus?

This report, which calls for an end to today's centralised health service and the adoption of competing european style social insurance system, has been endorsed by prominent health experts. The main thrust is that the government should neither provide nor finance health, it should merely regulate. Instead hospitals and doctors should be made fully independent of Whitehall, in the form of local trusts. Families would subscribe to one of a number of social insurers, who would then buy services from one of the independent providers. Ex-minister Frank Field says that "if the present government's reforms do not soon show signs of success, a system of competing health suppliers regulated by government and run on insurance lines will begin to be practical politics."

Read it here.