Posts Tagged competition
‘Reform our libel laws, but not our NHS’?
Posted by James Gubb in Health on 25/03/2010
The budget has set the challenge. By 2013-14, the NHS will be expected to deliver annual efficiency savings of £15 to 20 billion. The financial year 2010-11 will be the last year until at least 2013-14 (if not further) when the NHS will receive real terms increases in funding. Whatever they say currently, it will not be very different under a Tory government.
Batten down the hatches
Posted by James Gubb in Health on 21/12/2009
The change in times seems marked. In its 2002 command paper, Delivering the NHS Plan, the government adopted a new paradigm that choice and competition was the means to a more efficient and responsive service:
‘If it is to better respond to the needs of patients the NHS can no longer be run as a monolithic, top-down, monopoly provider… Patients will choose hospitals… [and] changes to the funding flows and incentives will… enable all providers – public or private – who offer good quality and value for money to more easily provide services for NHS patients…’
NHS Alliance takes on reform
Posted by Laura Brereton in Health on 26/10/2009
The pre-election season seems to have ignited a raft of prescriptions for fixing the NHS, and this is a good thing. In a new report entitled ‘Rebalancing the market,’ the NHS Alliance echoes the recent DH endorsement of the NHS as the market’s ‘preferred provider’, but it presents a different rationale.
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NHS providers as priority—a policy shift?
Posted by Laura Brereton in Health on 21/09/2009
The Financial Times is claiming health secretary Andy Burnham’s recent statements advocating NHS organisations over independent bodies as providers of state-funded health care backpeddle on current policy. Read the rest of this entry »
In defence of pluralism
Posted by James Gubb in Economics, Health on 04/06/2009
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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Reform at the mercy of government
Posted by James Gubb in Health on 04/09/2008
In an article for The Fraser Institute, we argue the lessons for Canada from the NHS reform programme are less that competition in health care has failed, but rather that market-based health care reforms in the UK have been crippled by the government’s unwillingness to stop directing the service from the centre. The reform programme as a whole has been ‘a botched job driven by political imperative, constant reconfiguration, and central diktat’.