Peter Lazenby
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A COLLAPSE of the NHS will take Britain’s economy with it, a new report by healthcare experts and economists has warned.
The report found that despite 13 years of chronic underfunding by the Tory government, the service’s “overall business model is not only sound — it is the best healthcare model yet demonstrated in practice in an advanced economy.”
All it lacks is funding.
The team which produced the report, The Rational Policy Maker’s Guide to the NHS, came from the 99 per cent Organisation, Keep Our NHS Public, The National Health Action Party and Every Doctor campaign group.
It will be officially launched on the 75th anniversary of the NHS on July 4 at 5pm in the committee rooms of Parliament.
“The current underperformance of the NHS is the inevitable result of 13 years of underfunding — no healthcare system can withstand such levels of sustained underfunding,” the report states.
“If the NHS is allowed to fail, the economy will fail with it — the economy cannot afford not to fund the NHS properly.”
The report’s lead author Mark E Thomas, who is a visiting professor at the prestigious IE Business School in Madrid, said: “There is no dispute that the NHS is struggling badly, but there is certainly dispute about how to fix it.
“This report shows that calls for further privatisation or introduction of insurance-based funding for the NHS are misguided: they would be harmful to the health of the population and they would cripple the economy.
“The route back to success is proper funding of the NHS coupled with increased investment in prevention and effective poverty reduction.”
The report says that underfunding the NHS inevitably creates an increasingly sick population which in turn leads to lower productivity and lower economic output.
“This results in less money being available for healthcare funding; and the downward cycle continues. A decade of this has been harmful; continuing with this policy would be a disaster,” it states.
The launch of the report will be chaired by Labour MP Richard Burgon with a panel of medical professionals, leading campaigners and NHS trust chief executives.
