More people should go private, not fewer

At a general election press conference in 1987, Margaret Thatcher was asked whether she trusted the NHS sufficiently to use it herself. She replied: “I, along with something like five million other people, insure to enable me to go into hospital on the day I want; at the time I want, and with a doctor I want. For me, that is absolutely vital.”

You cannot imagine a politician responding with such candour to the same question today. Here we are, more than 35 years on, still fixated on whether people should exercise their right to spend their own money on their own health.

The question that arose then, and still does, is whether the NHS is capable of providing the same levels of care that might be available privately. Increasingly, people seeking quicker consultations and diagnoses are opting to use their own money because of the delays in the NHS, the blockages in A&E and the difficulties in getting to see a GP.

The sensitivity of this issue among politicians was evident last Sunday when Rishi Sunak was asked on the BBC whether he uses private health care. He declined to answer directly, saying it was not relevant. He sought to explain it further in the Commons yesterday, saying he was registered with an NHS GP but had used independent health care in the past. That does not rule out having private health insurance cover, but why shouldn’t he?

Instead of being defensive about it, Mr Sunak should be encouraging the take-up and expansion of private cover through tax breaks.

The problem is that the Labour Party continues to dominate this issue. MPS yesterday spent their parliamentary day debating “fair taxation” for private schools, a policy designed to force the independent sector into penury with only the very rich able to attend the schools that survive.

People who go private, either for their health care or to send their children to school, still pay for the state sector through their taxes and – by not using it, or not to the same extent – reduce the burden on the state. If the NHS worked as it should, given the amounts of money pumped into it, then no one would need private insurance. One reason it doesn’t is the objection of vested state interests to the idea of charges or co-payments and other reforms that might improve the service for everyone but are blocked on ideological grounds.

It might have been hoped that this argument had been laid to rest in 1987 but it seems we are doomed to live with it forever.