Strange piece for The Guardian. Zoe seems to be questioning the very ethos of the NHS.

For the obvious reason that we don’t pay for it, the health system
seems to us to be largely outside commerce, totally uncoupled from the
rules of the market that govern every other decision of our lives. It
seems perfectly reasonable to delay having children pending some
financial security, and perfectly unreasonable to delay an operation
for said child on the same grounds.

It’s warped thinking, but
straightening it out would mean dragging the NHS into the unsentimental
market, where any one of our lives might turn out to be worth less than
money, so let’s warp away.

She then goes on to discuss NICE, which of course does (as she says) precisely that unsentimental work of deciding how much our lives are indeed worth and refusing to pay for certain treatments.

As Johnny Munkhammar has pointed out, it may well be that we would all like to pay more for health care. It wouldn’t be all that much of a surprise that as wealth grows, certain needs are fully taken care of and the portion of our incomes that we’re prepared to pay on health rises. It becomes more important in the heirarchy of needs.

However, by having a tax funded system we never really will find out how much people are prepared to pay: elections and taxation are about much more than simply the health service, after all. There’s also the point that, well, who would you like to be deciding how much your life is worth? You or the bureaucrats at NICE?