Launch of The Rational Policy-Maker’s Guide to the NHS report

This House welcomes the publication of the report The Rational Policy-Maker’s Guide to the NHS; supports the report’s main conclusions that the NHS is the best and most cost-effective healthcare model yet to be demonstrated in practice in an advanced economy, that the current serious underperformance of the NHS is not the result of its publicly-funded and publicly-provided model but the inevitable result of 13 years of underfunding, and that the worsening health of the British public resulting from this underinvestment is holding back economic growth; notes that the NHS was, until recently, consistently regarded as the best health service in the world by the Commonwealth Fund; further believes that NHS funding has failed to keep pace with need and that no healthcare system can withstand the levels of sustained underfunding experienced by the NHS since 2010 without significant deterioration in its performance; rejects calls for any greater role for the private sector in the NHS, for any privatisation of the NHS or any replacement of funding through progressive taxation with direct charges or what would be a more expensive insurance-based system; and encourages all hon. Members to read the report and policy-makers to act in line with its recommendations and findings.