Civitas Blog

The NHS has always been Labour’s favourite child, representing its now faded and tattered dream of fully socialised public services. Grown old and decrepit, for some years now it has been reliant on ever more potent injections of government cash to keep it in proximate working order, a course of treatment now shortly about to end as basically the medicine has run out.

The treatment has not worked. The patient continues steadily to decline and the hour is surely approaching when the hard decision will have to be made to take it off life-support and replace it with a new system more reliant on patient choice and consumer sovereignty, albeit one that preserves protection for all against medical catastrophe regardless of means.

How sick the patient is indicated by the results of on-line poll of over 3,000 doctors currently working for the NHS conducted by the Times and published in today’s issue. A majority denied any improvement in the NHS had occurred since 2002, denied the increased funding on the NHS had been well-spent, and denied that their own specific area of medicine had benefited in any way.

That almost double the number of the doctors polled thought the NHS would fare better under David Cameron than Gordon Brown suggests a truly profound level of doctor disillusion with New Labour’s approach to health care.

In the run up to the next election, the Conservatives have a window of opportunity to develop a policy on health care that would put in place the ground-work for an appropriate system for the 21 century. Let us hope they do not squander it.