Health policy debate – 15 to 30 April 2005
The bitter debate on the NHS between Labour and Conservatives appears to have died down. Over the last couple of weeks the only minor skirmish followed Michael Howard accusing Tony Blair of "lying" about Conservative policies on health. "Mr Blair started this campaign by lying about our spending plans. When it became clear that he could not sustain these claims, he dropped them”. [Go to note 1]
Conservative Party chairman, Liam Fox, told BBC 2's Daily Politics programme: "It's your own money back. It's not state money”. [Go to note 2] When asked on ITV news whether he now accepted that Mr Howard did not want to charge anyone for using the NHS, Mr Blair replied: "Yeah".
The election debate has not directly touched on health policy as much as it did in the early days of the campaign – discussion of targets aside. The terrain has switched to economic policy and with this a greater focus on levels of taxation and how tax is spent. There has been a renewed focus on productivity within the health policy debate.
As Celia Hall wrote in the Daily Telegraph, productivity is difficult to measure. ‘Arguably, ways of monitoring increased activity in hospital statistics are out of date. Nonetheless, an increase of NHS spending of about 50 per cent since 1996-97 compares poorly with an increase in activity of only 9.9 per cent between 1998 and 2004.’ The Telegraph claims the NHS deficit is now £1bn. [Go to note 3]
The Economist put the NHS on its cover and praised the government for finally focusing on productivity. ‘At great expense to the taxpayer, Labour has learnt that markets matter more than cash in improving the NHS’. It is good that although the political parties 'dwell on small differences' all agree with the basic direction that Labour has set for the NHS. The Economist is sure the move to payment-by-results will increase productivity. Too little is understood about the most basic financial issues. A finance director is quoted as saying, "we didn't really understand our cost base before and now we have to". [Go to note 4]