This is the perfect analogy for how the NHS operates:
“The NHS held a boat race against a Japanese crew. After Japan won by a mile, a working party found the winners had 8 people rowing and one steering while the NHS had 8 steering and one rowing. So the NHS spent £15 million on consultants, forming a restructured crew of four assistant steering managers, three deputy managers and a director of steering services. The rower was then given an incentive to row harder. They held another race and lost by two miles, so the NHS fired the rower for poor performance, sold the boat and used the proceeds to pay a bonus to the director of steering services.. – That is what is happening all over the place. There is masses of bureaucracy in the health service and a denial of what people need.” Tony Benn MP Nov 1995.
‘The NHS is the last of the communist-style command-economy state organisations, the third employer in the free world with 1.5 million employees (who need something to do daily to justify their existence), paid for by a cheque from the Chancellor, managed by a central government ministry, dictating everything from what drugs to prescribe to what meals to serve, through the daily issuing of thousands of targets and initiatives that are baffling even to those who are supposed to carry them out. The failure of the politically controlled, state-funded NHS is sadly as inevitable as the failure of the politically controlled communist economies. The NHS is the best-intentioned organisation in the world, but then the problem with communism wasn’t lack of good intentions. It was bad results.
We need to strip away the ideology and look at the successful systems that combine public and private, payments and insurance, such as in France, Germany and the Netherlands. We should have wide social insurance schemes that repay – in all or part – the cost of treatments to patients, allowing them to choose which doctor they go to and which hospital they are treated at. Doctors and hospitals, whether state or private, should publish figures on their success rates and woo patients to gain the money they bring with them, rather than take them for granted.
Our treatment should be widely available and NHS funded to help people stop drinking and stop using drugs.