Rishi Sunak’s big pitch this weekend is to grip the NHS waiting list crisis. It makes political sense, given the terrifying size of these lists now, with some trusts declaring their waits ‘unmanageable’. By the time of the next election, the crisis in the NHS is going to seem monstrous.
Ethical concerns tend to end up fading whenever a government has failed to do the long-term planning it could have done
The former chancellor is worried that the surge in people seeking private treatment is ‘privatisation by the back door’. James and I discuss the wider context of this on our latest Coffee House Shots podcast, agreeing that if people feel forced to go private, the underlying public consent for the NHS itself will start to erode. That’s not something any government, particularly a Conservative one, really wants to contemplate as it tends to rebound politically on whoever is in power rather than on the health system itself.
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