Rachel Reeves’ budget, the first Labour budget for 14 years, gave the NHS much-needed money, despite the fact that the increase in employers’ national insurance would take a fair bite out of it so must be borne in mind. But how the figures are viewed matters almost as much.
There is a phrase, often used by those critical of NHS spending: ‘pouring money into the NHS’. This has connotations of waste, of ‘throwing good money after bad’. It seeks to throw NHS spending in a bad light – a rhetorical trap. Because money spent on healthcare is never poured. It is given, budgeted for, calculated as a deliberate political process. It is invested. Most things will need more money, as prices rise inexorably. We can all expect to pay more for almost everything. Why not the NHS? Yet all too often, this becomes ‘pouring’. Followed by vague assertions of ‘inefficiency’. Which invariably ignore the sheer size and complexity of our National Health Service. Which of course has inefficiencies. Yet NHS staff will seek to overcome those, given the chance.
After over 14 years of systematic neglect, our NHS is in a parlous state. It needs more money to be invested in it so that it can regain its former abilities and itself invest in the healthcare changes which have the promise of making everyone’s lives better: genomics, AI (to assist healthcare judgements, not replace them), investment in infrastructure, better community care, joined-up social and healthcare provision and – of course – more well-trained and qualified people. But never assume for one moment that the NHS is going to ‘swallow up’ our tax money as politicians recklessly ‘pour’ this wantonly in some ill-informed frenzy of mis-spending. The greatest benefit we can give the NHS is to invest in that and make it better. The greatest dis-service is to deny its value by resorting to tropes designed to distract from the truth: that the NHS is a great idea, and spending money on it is a good thing.
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