Deliberately provocative title, but…
Reading the threads tonight about the crisis in the NHS. Half the responses talk about some form of privatisation being the issue/ aim. We fundamentally do not have enough doctors and nurses, we haven’t trained enough, have just reduced the number of training places available, and pay below the going rate globally so the ones we do have are leaving.
Until we face up to this and stop treating the NHS as a political football this will not change.
We either need to pay more tax (ideally while trimming some of the unnecessary roles in the system and making the most of its scale) - or we need to move to a social insurance system like our European neighbours have, where there is a role for the private sector in delivering care and it adds to capacity.
Neither of these appears politically palatable. Why?