Brown's blind spot: the NHS
Britain's public healthcare leads the world in one way, at least: its doctors are now the richest in Europe.
A couple of budgets ago, Gordon Brown decided the best way to improve the National Health Service was to borrow £70bn and throw a party. A 7.4% rise in funding every year until 2008, an extra £6bn year on year to 2005. The money's been allocated in entirely the wrong way: a 43% pay rise for doctors, half of it swallowed in pay and pensions, barely a quarter going on actual patient care. Yet productivity has gone down by nearly 1%. The workers are doing the same job, and in many cases, less of a job (you work fewer evenings if you're being paid more for days); they're just being paid more for it. The average income of a GP is now £63K, a specialist £81K, and the total bill has doubled in the past five years.
London's Harley St, full of clinics, has always been full of rich doctors - and there's nothing wrong with that. A doctor in private practice is running her own business, taking her own risks, and should be able to charge what the market can support. But GPs are public servants, exchanging the risks of the market for an assured income; along with the civil service under New Labour, they now enjoy salaries akin to a risk-taking businessman. Without any of the risk.
The NHS has always been Brown's blind spot: like so many Labour voters, he believes there's something special about healthcare, that the normal laws of economics don't apply. He's wrong. However noble its purpose, healthcare is just another product/service. And the sellers of those services are out to maximise their benefit; they'll take whatever they can.
Who else is to blame for this? Nobody. Not the doctors. Doctors are not fundamentally 'better people' the way some expect them to be; they're just people, earning money for doing a day's work same as anyone else. And like anyone else, doctors know a gravy train when it stops at the station.
So Britain's bloated public sector continues to grow, sucking parasitically at the bank accounts of those who actually create wealth, healing those without enough self-responsibility to take out a minimal £5-a-week health insurance and doing it inefficiently. Yet in a way, I'm heartened, because things like this are just another nail in the coffin of New Labour.
A couple of budgets ago, Gordon Brown decided the best way to improve the National Health Service was to borrow £70bn and throw a party. A 7.4% rise in funding every year until 2008, an extra £6bn year on year to 2005. The money's been allocated in entirely the wrong way: a 43% pay rise for doctors, half of it swallowed in pay and pensions, barely a quarter going on actual patient care. Yet productivity has gone down by nearly 1%. The workers are doing the same job, and in many cases, less of a job (you work fewer evenings if you're being paid more for days); they're just being paid more for it. The average income of a GP is now £63K, a specialist £81K, and the total bill has doubled in the past five years.
London's Harley St, full of clinics, has always been full of rich doctors - and there's nothing wrong with that. A doctor in private practice is running her own business, taking her own risks, and should be able to charge what the market can support. But GPs are public servants, exchanging the risks of the market for an assured income; along with the civil service under New Labour, they now enjoy salaries akin to a risk-taking businessman. Without any of the risk.
The NHS has always been Brown's blind spot: like so many Labour voters, he believes there's something special about healthcare, that the normal laws of economics don't apply. He's wrong. However noble its purpose, healthcare is just another product/service. And the sellers of those services are out to maximise their benefit; they'll take whatever they can.
Who else is to blame for this? Nobody. Not the doctors. Doctors are not fundamentally 'better people' the way some expect them to be; they're just people, earning money for doing a day's work same as anyone else. And like anyone else, doctors know a gravy train when it stops at the station.
So Britain's bloated public sector continues to grow, sucking parasitically at the bank accounts of those who actually create wealth, healing those without enough self-responsibility to take out a minimal £5-a-week health insurance and doing it inefficiently. Yet in a way, I'm heartened, because things like this are just another nail in the coffin of New Labour.
posted by chrisworth at 11:20 AM
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