Date published: 2005/08/13
The BBC says:
A tax-funded NHS, free at the point of use, is unsustainable, one of Britain's most senior doctors has said.
Bernie Ribeiro, the new president of the Royal College of Surgeons, said patients should be forced to pay part of the cost of treatment.
They would take out insurance to cover that, he told the Daily Telegraph.
But Unison, the UK's largest health union, said the public was "rightly proud" of the existing NHS structure and would object to such changes.
The social insurance system suggested by Mr Ribeiro would be similar to those in France and Germany.
"We will have to look hard at an alternative system," he told the Telegraph.
"If we are to provide healthcare free at the point of need all the time for patients, then I don't think that's achievable in the present structure."
Mr Ribeiro argued that the rising cost of technology and medical staff would make a tax-funded NHS unsustainable in the medium term.
He said: "The working population is reasonably well paid, we could afford our workers to make an identifiable contribution towards healthcare - not one hidden in national insurance and taxation."
But contributions would be means-tested, with the poorest people required to pay nothing at all, he said.
Hmmm, let's see. Mr Ribeiro wants to change the current funding system, which is partly based on national insurance (a tax on wages) and partly on income tax (a tax on wages and investments) with some other "insurance" system which is effectively a tax on wages (and investments?). In other words replacing the current system with an almost identical one (except possibly the exact proportion of wage versus non-wage income going to the NHS might be different). The only real difference seems to be that the contribution is supposed to be "identifiable" rather than just lumped in with all the other government tax. Does that really matter (to the citizens of Britain rather than economists)? (Anybody who is really interested in costs can just look at the NHS budget relative to the entire government budget and do the trivial arithmetic to figure out how much tax they are paying towards the NHS.) You know you have a marketing person in charge when window dressing is supposed to make a difference to an organisation. (Of course perhaps he wants the "insurance" to depend on other factors such as age and health history, if so he should say so clearly.)
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