Archive for category Economics

PCTs run up in-year deficits

Civitas, in conjunction with The Guardian, has today released figures obtained from PCT board papers that show, while the NHS is forecasting a surplus of over £1bn for the year, a number of PCTs – that buy care on behalf of patients – are currently in deficit in the year to-date.  While not threatening the NHS’s overall financial position at present, the lack of financial control in PCTs is of serious concern ahead of tighter financial times.

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BMA campaign to shut out independent sector from NHS is misguided and foolhardy

The BMA today extend their ‘Look After Our NHS’ campaign, to stop commercially run firms providing NHS care and end the market in the NHS, to patients.

Leaflets will be distributed containing stories such as a 70-year-old lady who is forced to go to a treatment centre run by a private provider and suffers ‘complications’.

The BMA are shamelessly politicising health care on cherry-picked evidence.

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Some Looney Tunes Cartoons Are Not So Loony

Schools Secretary Ed Balls recently announced that, under the rubric of the new Personal, Social, Health and Economic curriculum to be introduced from September 2011, children as young as five will be given lessons on how to save.

Editorial columns have greeted the announcement with derision, rightly commenting on the irony involved.

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Failing to Figure

On the Daily Telegraph’s blog, Richard Preston writes about Civitas’ latest publication, Failing to Figure by Mervyn Stone, emeritus professor of statistics at UCL.  Half-way through, Preston makes the wry observation:

‘His biggest case study is the immensely complicated, deceitful and deluded means by which the formula was arrived at that determines how much of the NHS budget goes to each of the 152 primary care trusts in England. It’s almost proof of his case that you need to be a professional statistician to follow his argument: the chances of politicians understanding the formula, and therefore assessing whether it was fair, were virtually nil.’

True, it’s complicated.  But here’s something of an idiots’ guide (something also that Nigel Hawkes has written about in a typically eloquent way in the British Medical Journal):
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In defence of pluralism

The Economist carries an article this week that the NHS – and not least the new Competition and Cooperation Panel – would do well to look at.  ‘Innovation through regulation’, ‘America’s stunning success in information technology was not the free market but government regulation’ punches a strange headline.
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Another Fine Mess the Government Has Got Us All Into

For some years now, it has been the declared ambition of the present government to increase the participation rate of young people at university to 50 per cent. Whether it was a wise ambition is questionable, seeing how incapable of achievement it has always been without seriously diluting A-level and final honours standards. However, because of it, young people have been staying on at school in unprecedented numbers with a view to securing a university place. Now, suddenly, just when they have been doing exactly what the government has long been encouraging them to, it has cruelly pulled the rug from under their feet by capping university places.

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