Health Secretary: funding crisis threatens the NHS
This exclusive article highlights the battle lines emerging around the need to reform the NHS.
It explains how Andrew Lansley accepts the need to trim his reformist sails – it goes on though to say “However, the Health Secretary makes clear that the changes are essential to cope with the “enormous financial pressures” generated by advances in medical science and a rapidly ageing population.
“He says that unless “we act now”, real terms health spending will ultimately double to £230 billion a year – or £7,000 a second – by 2030.
“This is something we simply cannot afford,” he says. His focus on the cost implications of allowing the NHS to continue as it is are part of the Coalition’s drive to help explain why the decision has been taken to shake up the service fundamentally.”
The demographic time-bomb of increasing numbers of the elderly is at its most acute in rural areas and this is where I anticipate some of the most significant pressures to occur in future.
I sometimes yearn for the 1980s – that might sound strange – but in those days you could go to university without paying, have a reasonable pension, buy a house and go to a reasonable local school without all the current agony of choice and competition.