Stephen Law

Tory plans to marketize the NHS are supposedly justified by data. E.g. data showing that when doctors are made independent financial agents free to buy services from whoever they like on behalf of patients, costs are driven down. But the truth is this is just another "private good, public bad" myth. In particular, the evidence actually suggests that this kind of marketization is not a money saver. In fact the evidence strongly suggests that it's inefficient . As this research by McKinsey confirms. Go here for report in the Huffington post. Of course Lansley must know all this. He's seen the evidence. Ben Goldacre has previously pointed it out how Lansley twists those facts and evidence to make his case. Last week we saw that the government had overstated the failings of the NHS by using dodgy figures (to be precise, they used misleading static figures instead of time trends). We saw that the health secretary Andrew Lansley's repeated claim that his reforms are ...

Suppose I am very very rich, and very very selfish. The NHS annoys me intensely. It costs lots in tax revenue to run, and being very rich, I pay proportionately more of my income on it, and of course far more in terms of hard cash, than almost anyone else. I also resent the fact that my business empire is unable to cash in on providing the services that people would buy from my private businesses if the NHS was not there. BUT, the public loves the NHS, even many Tories are fond of it, and to propose scrapping it would provoke howls of outrage. Plus there's no evidence I can marshal that the public would get a better service if it were provided by the private sector - rather the opposite in fact. What would I do? Here's what I would do. First, I'd ensure a team of expert PR people run the Tory party - people adept at twisting facts, spinning, and indeed telling bare faced lies and getting away with it. And I'd have my private health companies etc. fund them generou...