NHS will remain free to use and funded by general taxation, government says

The NHS will remain funded from general taxation and free for patients to use, the government has pledged, in a statement that appears to rule out the introduction of charges to access care.

The government was responding to new projections from the Office for Budget Responsibility showing that the health service would need such large sums of money in the coming decades that it would threaten the UK’s public finances.

Growing demand for care and breakthroughs in treatment mean the next government in 2020 will have to end the NHS’s decade-long period of 1% annual budget increases, the OBR’s experts believe.

Analysis of the OBR report on future public spending on healthcare by the Nuffield Trust health thinktank shows that NHS spending UK-wide would have to rise from £139bn now to as much as £234bn by 2030 just to keep it keep working. That is based on its share of GDP going up from 7.4% now to 8.8% by 2030, one of the smaller increases the OBR envisaged.

The OBR said a growing and ageing population and increasing use of technology in healthcare would force ministers to spend more of Britain’s national wealth on the NHS. It set out eight different increases in GDP that could occur by 2065-66.

If older people start to exhibit better health than at present, and some evidence suggests that is already happening, then the NHS’s share of GDP may only have to go up slightly, to 7.9%, according to the OBR’s fiscal sustainability and public spending on health report. Its proportion of national wealth is due to fall to 6.9% by 2020, however, despite the extra £10bn that ministers are giving the service in England during this parliament.

If it become subject to “constant other cost pressures”, it may need to consume as much as 18.5% of GDP in 50 years’ time – more than double the current proportion – just to keep providing good-quality services.

Prof John Appleby, the director of research at the Nuffield Trust, welcomed the OBR’s calculations as proof that “the amount the health service is projected to cost the UK in the long-term continues to be affordable through general taxation”.

With the NHS budget UK-wide hitting £234bn by 2030, Appleby insisted that the 3.5% a year budget increases needed to raise its GDP share to 8.8% by then involved sums that “aren’t astronomical.”

At the moment, the NHS receives £139bn a year of the £1.9tn total value of GDP. If ministers decide to raise its share of GDP to 8.8%, that would see it get £234bn of what is expected to be the £2.7tn of national wealth in 2030.

“The potential increase of £95bn represents an average annual real-terms increase of 3.5%, less than the historical UK average of 4% each year,” Appleby said.

Ministers may decide not to substantially boost NHS funding after a “lost decade” of low funding between 2010 and 2020, Appleby added. Doing that would mean that it would not be able to afford to pay for new treatments, care quality would suffer and waiting times for treatment would rise, he said.

A government spokesperson said: “As the Nuffield Trust analysis makes clear, the way the NHS is currently funded continues to be sustainable and the public can be assured that under this government the NHS will remain free at the point of use.”

In an interview with the Guardian earlier this year Jeremy Hunt, the health secretary, said that whoever was in power after the 2020 general election would have to give the NHS a lot more money.

“The biggest risk to a single payer model when it’s coming through taxation is if the government screws up the economy,” he said. “If you have a strong growing economy, governments always have a choice to put more money into the NHS. It’s what Tony Blair did in the early 2000s. It’s what George Osborne did in the last spending review.

“And as we eliminate the deficit, providing the economy continues to grow, we will have that choice again in the future. I, for one, think we will have to put more money into the NHS, going forward, because of the pressures of an ageing population.”

NHS will remain free to use and funded by general taxation, government says

Remember the ice bucket challenge? It just funded an ALS breakthrough

It is often easy to dismiss viral charity campaigns as “slacktivism”, which lacks in real-world impact (we never did catch the warlord Joseph Kony, after all) but a breakthrough discovery bankrolled by 2014’s ALS ice bucket challenge may give the lie to that cynicism.

The ice bucket challenge was a phenomenon in the summer of 2014 in which people dunked a bucket of iced water over their heads in order to solicit donations before nominating others to do the same.

Scores of celebrities including Mark Zuckerberg, Anna Wintour, Tom Cruise, Charlie Sheen, Robert Downey Jr and hundreds more made videos, but the campaign was criticised by some.

Slate wrote that “for most of the people posting ice bucket videos of themselves on Facebook, Vine, and Instagram, the charity part remains a postscript”, while Time called it “problematic in almost every way”, going on to say that “most of its participants … didn’t mention the disease at all. The chance to jump on the latest trend was an end in itself. In fact, the challenge’s structure seems almost inherently offensive to those touched by ALS.”

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But the proof of the pudding was in the eating: the campaign raised more than $ 100m in a 30-day period, and was able to fully fund a number of research projects.

One of these was Project MinE, a large data-driven initiative funded by the ALS Association through ice bucket challenge donations, as well as donations from the organization’s Georgia and New York chapters. The project’s researchers announced on Monday that they have identified a new gene associated with the disease, which experts say could lead to new treatment possibilities.

Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, also known ALS or Lou Gehrig’s Disease, is a neurological disorder in which the motor neurons that control muscle function slowly die. The disease can be either sporadic or inherited, and in either case there is currently no cure.

“It’s very exciting because it shows everyone who contributed to the ice bucket challenge that their donation had an impact on the research,” said Brian Frederick, executive vice-president of communications and development at the ALS Association. “The work that Project MinE is doing is really important, and the discovery of this new gene will help us better understand ALS.”

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The newly discovered gene, NEK1, is only associated with 3% of ALS cases, but it is present in both inherited and sporadic forms of the disease, which researchers say gives them a new target for the development of possible treatments.

Project MinE has been working to sequence the genomes of 15,000 people with the disease, and the discovery, which was described in a paper published on Monday in the journal Nature Genetics, involved more than 80 researchers in 11 countries.

The discovery was significant, Frederick said, “because it helps us understand what’s triggering this and can help us better find a treatment,” though he added that “it’s still very early in our understanding of this particular gene, and we still have a ways to go with understanding ALS generally.”

Remember the ice bucket challenge? It just funded an ALS breakthrough

How much do we want to hold the NHS publicly funded and cost-free?

In his report, Lord Warner describes the NHS as ‘outdated, cosseted and unaffordable’. Photograph: Christopher Furlong/Getty Photographs

Lord Warner, the former Labour health minister, should be delighted with the reaction to his report proposing, amongst other items, a £10-a-month NHS “membership fee” and the imposition of £20-a-evening “hotel” costs for hospital stays. An obscure report from an obscure right-wing thinktank, co-authored by an obscure and unelected politician, has resulted in a media splash past expectations. Why is this? The solution is that in spite of the criticism heaped upon his suggestions (and upon him personally), Warner has posed an important query – “how much do we want to maintain a well being services publicly funded and free at the level of delivery?”

In fairness to Warner, his tips are not that very easily pigeonholed as proper-wing dottiness. Indeed, significantly of the report is uncontentious mainstream stuff (neighborhood providers, prevention, integrated care), concepts anathema to the political proper (escalating inheritance job) or a public health specialist’s dream (taxes on alcohol, tobacco, gambling and sugar). But it is his description of the NHS as “outdated, cosseted and unaffordable” that is crucial – a challenge to the dominant paradigm of the past 60 years.

Warner helps make two assumptions. 1st that the austerity programme based mostly upon lowering public paying is the only way to deal with the deficit, and secondly that the NHS of the long term is only viable if folks pay out far more in direction of the expenses. His regressive NHS Poll Tax of £10 per particular person per month (regardless of revenue) is surely an odd subscription alternative to a much more simple increase in common taxation or national insurance contributions.

Warner estimates that the measures he proposes would increase all around £6bn a year to plug the NHS funding gap but fails to mention other techniques of raising a lot of a lot more occasions this quantity. Nye Bevan famously stated that “the religion of socialism is the language of priorities” and there have been echoes of this in David Cameron’s latest remark even though responding to the flooding crisis – “Funds,” he declared, “is no object in this relief work. No matter what money is necessary, we will devote it.” Men and women will reasonably inquire why this principle may not also hold good for the NHS.

As an different to Warner’s menu of expenses and co-payments we may well consider: the official estimate (and almost definitely an underestimate) of yearly uncollected tax is £32bn, but HMRC is suffering workers cuts. Uncollected VAT alone accounts for all around £10bn a year.

The Afghan war (hardly a effective venture) is estimated to have value the United kingdom around £37bn – a startling instance of governments obtaining income when they select.

A capital gains tax levy on the £200bn of wealth accumulated by the richest one,000 folks (yes men and women) in the United kingdom because the economic crash would increase about £50bn.

The undesired and botched NHS reorganisation has price around £4bn, not considerably more than the quantity misplaced to the exchequer by the beneath-valuation of the current sale of Royal Mail.

A lot of other examples could be cited of misjudged priorities and wasteful expenditure. While the NHS is far from ideal in its use of sources, Warner absolutely sets up a false dichotomy in claiming that funding the NHS risks significantly damaging other important public companies.

Hitherto, breaches of the principle of publicly funded healthcare free at the point of use (such as prescription expenses) have been portrayed as regrettable but essential aberrations. The relevance of Warner’s report is that he difficulties the extremely principle underpinning the NHS. Despite the fact that the membership charge of £10 a month may seem to be modest to several, it would hit those on minimal incomes tough and would, inevitably, be a rising yearly charge.

Do we want to slide down this slippery slope in direction of costs, co-payments and dependence on private healthcare insurance cover? The Scots and the Welsh would surely not be coming along for the ride, and we can be positive that no sane political party will want to go to the folks in 2015 providing a manifesto of co-payments for healthcare. Polls regularly uncover enormous help for not only maintaining the current program of funding but also for extending it to social care. So it is a measure that is the two unfair and unpopular.

Nevertheless, what Warner has helped develop is a “zombie policy” – currently politically dormant but waiting to be provided the kiss of daily life in the long term. The political dilemma is that even though polls persistently present substantial help for retaining the present funding model for the NHS, the identical polls demonstrate significantly significantly less willingness to countenance larger taxes to spend for it. Warner has posed an essential question and come up with the wrong answer, but can the electorate be persuaded to will the implies as nicely as the ends?

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How much do we want to hold the NHS publicly funded and cost-free?