President Obama’s battle to get his healthcare bill through Congress was big news on this side of the Atlantic last year, not least for the way our own National Health Service (NHS) was used as a reference point in the debate. Now though, it is Britain’s (or, to be specific, England’s) turn to be consumed by arguments about healthcare reform, and if you were to listen to some critics, you’d imagine just as much was at stake. The reform in question is the British Government’s Health and Social Care Bill, which is currently the subject of some fairly furious wrangling in the House of Lords. The bill entered committee stage last week after the Government won a key Lords vote, but although it now looks almost certain to become law in some form, there’s still fierce debate about many of the details.
Depending on where you stand, the health bill will either drag Britain’s creaking NHS into the 21st century, or it marks the first stage in the dismantling of a national institution. Actually though, some of this rhetoric is a little overblown. The bill represents a wide-ranging and pretty dramatic package of reforms, but it’s still some way short of an Obama moment. One thing it does not do is challenge the fundamental tenet on which the NHS was founded, which is that everyone in Britain has access to universal healthcare ‘free at the point of use’, funded through taxation. That tenet is rather less perfectly applied than is sometimes admitted – many people do have to pay prescription charges, and NHS coverage of dentistry is pretty patchy – but it’s nevertheless an article of faith for the British public, and no mainstream political party would dare to challenge it (overtly at least).
Still, the bill does make two very substantial changes to the way the NHS is organised across England (although it has been brought by the UK government, it does not apply to Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland, all of which have devolved powers for their own parts of the NHS). The two key changes are both designed to make the NHS more efficient in the face of Britain’s financial crisis, both could have far-reaching implications and both have been hugely controversial. Firstly, it abolishes a whole tier of NHS management and hands its powers instead to the family doctors at the frontline – the general practitioners, or GPs, as they are known here. Secondly, it loosens the constraints on the NHS’s internal market, providing scope for private companies to compete to run many more NHS services. The two reforms are intended to work together to drive efficiency across the health service, and the efficiencies required are pretty frightening – 4% a year for the next four years.
