Happy Birthday NHS, but the question is can we continue with an NHS model that is at best patchy at worst totally inefficient and causing unnecessary deaths. We spend billions on health, the NHS one of the biggest organisations in the world but we still have not got the quality of our healthcare up to the average European level. Its time we look to our European neighbours and copied their system of social insurance. Copied from http://www.westbromblog.blogspot.com/: Politicians will go to any length to convince us that we can trust them with the health service, from Blair's "24 hours to save the NHS" to Cameron's "safe in our hands". As the NHS reaches 60 they are clambering over each other to offer policy tit-bits. Some modest structural reform, giving patients a choice of hospital, scrapping targets, introducing patient review tables. None of these will actually address the fundamental failings of the NHS. There can be no doubt about the scale of the extra resources that Labour have pumped into the NHS over the last 10 years, but it is equally clear that the extra resources have not created a service of the standard of our continental neighbours. We have fewer doctors per head of population than any European country apart from Albania. We import nurses and doctors from the world's poorest countries, and export sick people to some of the richest. By the Government's own estimates, 20 per cent of NHS money is wasted, and it now has more bureaucrats than beds. Its not cheap, its not efficient, it keeps people waiting. One in four cardiac patients die while waiting and one in five lung cancer patients wait so long they go from being treatable to untreatable. We all recognise these symptoms; we all know the disease - that the NHS is a politically controlled state monopoly that is institutionally unresponsive to the needs of patients - so why do we refuse to accept the cure? We only have to look to the Netherlands, France, Germany and Switzerland to see what we could have - the best healthcare system in the world through a system of competing but compulsory social insurance schemes that are independent of government, run by employer groups, unions, charities or mutual societies. Premiums that would be proportional to income, making sure the system is as fair as general taxation but allowing ordinary people to see more clearly the connection between the cost and the standard of service they receive. As recently introduced in France, premiums for the poor could be paid out of general taxation ensuring they get access to the same medical services as the rich. In the social insurance system the government need not own and run the hospitals or employ every clinician, mearly be the regulator, making sure the system works efficiently and ensuring the vulnerable are protected. It would be a one-tier system, unlike the NHS where the middle classes queue-jump by going private. As in France, all medical services should be free at the point of use, unless patients choose to pay for services in return for lower premiums. All eastern European countries had Soviet-style health systems identical to the NHS, delivering equally second-rate care, until the fall of the Berlin Wall. They then opened their minds, and almost all of them, from Poland to Romania, changed to social insurance. Social Insurance is not some right-wing plot to boost profits for insurance companies, but a way to make the health service work in the interests of patients rather than against them. Labours former Health Spokesman, Lord Desai accepts this, as does Labours favourite think-tank, the Institute for Public Policy Research. The public agree that the current NHS system is unsustainable, so what are we still waiting for? For the first time in living memory the public trust the Conservative party with the future of the NHS, why are we still failing to offer them a decent solution? quote>
