The next bitter battle over the NHS is looming

It’s been a while since we had a nice big fat NHS row, but those who enjoy watching Andy Burnham and Jeremy Hunt fight over the ‘party of the NHS’ crown can rest assured that there’s a really bitter one coming up this autumn. NHS England has spent the past few months consulting on a change to the way clinical commissioning groups are funded that could end the current arrangement where more money per capita is spent on patients in deprived areas. The formula currently being considered would make the number of elderly people in an area a more important factor in the size of the grant that each CCG receives.

You can probably already guess how this will play out in the political arena, but firstly, here’s the argument behind changing the formula. The money for the CCGs funds hospital care and so on, not public health spending which might be quite useful in some deprived areas where poor health can be combated through certain educational and preventative drives.