It’s an amazing world view, isn’t it?

Here’s a good boast: in a decade when national wealth rose by 30%, private practice fell by 1%.

By definition, people having more State services and fewer private ones is a good thing.

(I also seriously suspect that she’s made the old wealth/income mistake again. National wealth I suspect has grown much more than 30% over the decade: it’s GDP that has grown by that much and that’s income, not wealth. Yes, she has: from 1996 £2 trillion or so to 2003’sw £3.7 trillion…55% or so rise, not 30%.)

That kind of impatience is growing. They want it all and they want
it now, and that is exactly what Tony Blair encouraged with his
"choice" ideology. When he said he wanted to make booking a hospital
appointment like booking an airline ticket, that’s the unbridled
consumerism he endorsed.

The truth is the NHS is nothing like a
market. It is a collective agreement to spend a set amount of money as
efficiently and as fairly as possible. It is not open-ended – no health
system ever is: private insurers strictly limit treatments according to
the policy paid. The NHS has always been a better system, but it relies
on a measure of understanding by citizens of the nature of the compact.

And there is the reason that the NHS should indeed be more like a market. It isn’t providing what people want, whereas a system that had more of the market in it (like Germany or France) would do better on this score.  Simple really, the aim of a political system is, after all, to provide what the people want is it not? That’s why we have this deomcracy thing?