POLITICAL NECESSITY IS SELDOM EFFICIENT:

Cameron and Hewitt see bigger role for private sector in NHS (John Carvel, January 5, 2006, The Guardian)

The Tory leader, David Cameron, vied yesterday with the health secretary, Patricia Hewitt, to show how a tax-funded NHS could provide a better service if it bought more treatment from the private sector.

In a withering of the ideological divide, Mr Cameron dismayed supporters in the rightwing thinktanks by rejecting their arguments for reducing the pressure on public spending by funding the NHS through a system of social insurance. "I will never go down that route," he said.

He unambiguously committed the Conservatives to sustaining a tax-funded NHS "free at the point of need and available to everyone, regardless of how much money they have in the bank".

But he left open the possibility of the NHS becoming a purchaser of healthcare, with a dwindling role as provider.

It would obviously better to remove the government as even just the middle man, but transitioning to that middle man status in states with socialized medicine is conservative progress.

Posted by Orrin Judd at January 5, 2006 8:34 AM