THE ONLY THING THAT CAN CURE THE NHS

ONE of the most powerful arguments for a National Health Service is that it can use its huge buying power to keep its costs down.

Amazingly, the NHS has completely lost this advantage. Suppliers deal with individual hospital trusts, and use divideand-rule tactics to charge absurdly high prices for basic supplies.

Alongside this, hefty salary overpayments are never clawed back because the authorities cannot be bothered. And valuable drugs are spoiled because they are stored in broken refrigerators.

Individually, these instances are shocking and infuriating. The money poured down the drain was taken in taxes from the pay packets of hardworking people who budget their own household expenses with great care. The Government simply has no right to levy taxes, if it is going to toss the money around in this spendthrift, idiotic fashion.

And the companies who squeeze the NHS should be ashamed of their behaviour. Who knows how many cancers could have been cured, how many lives saved and nurses hired, if these greedy and unscrupulous firms had behaved ethically?

This is yet more proof that the politicisation of the NHS in recent years has done little good. It is no use increasing spending if so much of the money is promptly wasted. Nor is ‘marketising’ the service going to help if it places naïve bureaucrats at the mercy of practical private sector profiteers.

Those in all parties who sincerely want the NHS to survive and succeed should now seriously consider entrusting its fate to a non-political inquiry, perhaps a Royal Commission. Such a body could actually seek to improve the nation’s health, rather than to burnish its image with soundbites and spending boasts.