Why we should Privatise more of the National Health Service

The privatisation of our National Health Service (The NHS) has been a topic of debate for many of the 70 years since it was founded in 1948 by the post war Labour Government. My definition of privatise comes from the Oxford English Dictionary: “The Transfer (of a business, industry, or service) from public to private ownership and control.” In short, this means that some of the NHS would be transferred from government and state control into the hands of independent firms and companies for a fee. Currently only a tiny proportion (3%) of the NHS is privatised; I would like to see this changed but without affecting our population financially.

The NHS’s budget, all £116.4 billion of it in the 2015/16 financial year, is currently funded by the taxpayers of Britain with 98.6% of their budget coming from national insurance and general taxation (provides 80%). The other 1.4% comes from charging patients (1.2%) and sales of land along with car parking charges (0.2%). This extortionate bill is landing our country in debt we will find hard to repay and it is only going to get worse. Our ageing population means that by 2020/21 we are going to be spending £126.5 billion on our health service, 15.5% of our total expenditure.

Privatisation would help to overcome these economic problems and then allow more of the budget to be spent on things such as the resurfacing of roads which in turn may prevent accidents and ultimately save money. Currently, in Scotland and Wales there is no charge on prescriptions which costs the NHS £593 million in Wales alone. In 2014 £5.1 million pounds was spent on parcetamol alone which can be picked up for a few pence at your local supermarket. Conservative spokeswoman, Angela Burns has stated that: “People who can afford to pay for their medicine should pay, while those who cannot afford to pay, or live with long-term chronic conditions, should still be able to benefit from free medicine.”. This statement is one that I am in complete agreement with. I believe that our NHS should work on a means tested system meaning if you can afford to pay the full cost of your health care, you pay all of it. Or if you cannot afford it you  pay however much you can afford. 

If the NHS was privatised it would also give people more choice about where to go to receive their treatment. For example, in Bedfordshire the regional NHS has started a bid for an organisation to deliver all musculo-skeletal healthcare services for the next five years. Any qualified agency such as GP practices or private companies can bid. This competition will create forward thinking and new ideas all of which will benefit patients. The competition will also naturally force agencies to strive to the best in cost and service in order to attract ‘customers’ whereas in today’s world the NHS only has to compete with itself unless you are in the financial elite.

Furthermore, a private sector is not limited by the public’s budget and can therefore provide the best treatment to every patient. The ageing population we have and the increase in non-communicable diseases such as diabetes is limiting the NHS’s ability to “provide a comprehensive, excellent service, available to all” This may lead to the limitation of expensive treatments along with having to decide on the rationing of expensive drugs to terminally ill and elderly patients. Professor Karol Sikora has pointed out that over 25 cancer drugs cost more than £50,000 per year. He believes that: “Age should be taken into account when comparing the potential benefits of expensive treatments.”  This is not necessarily something I agree with; however, privatisation or the help of means tested subsidisation, of everyone not just the patients mentioned above, would go a long way towards covering those ever-increasing costs.

I do however believe it would be morally wrong not have the emergency services free to the whole nation. These emergency response teams save thousands of lives each year and without them I think we would be weakened as a nation. But the privatisation of other key areas would allow more services to be pledged into emergency provision, thus saving more lives. Today ambulances are expected to reach seriously ill patients in under 7 minutes. However, if you rupture your femoral artery you bleed to death in around 4. With the £1 billion spent on patients that have health insurance each year I believe you could get this time down to a minimum of 6 minutes.

Without privatising anymore of the NHS there are still ways you could save time and money for GPs and Nurses alike. Putting a charge on an appointment with your GP, as they do in Scandinavia, would not only act as a deterrent for people who do not really need to see them and thus save time as well as money. Putting as little as a £5 charge on every appointment would generate £1.7 billion per year.

The  NHS is currently under too much strain financially to provide the best service it can to all its patients. It is for this reason that something has to change. In my opinion privatisation is the best option as it would relieve the government of the constant and unsustainable pressure to fund it out of the public purse and it would reduce our national expenditure greatly. 

 Fergus Cato, Year 11, October 2017