A permanent emergency
We’re all going to pay for the NHS’s 70th birthday bailout. Before long, it will need another
SOURCES: INSTITUTE FOR FISCAL STUDIES, INSTITUTE FOR PUBLIC POLICY RESEARCH, OECD
The NHS was a robust 60 year old, but it is decidedly frail as it notches up three score years and ten. It has endured the longest squeeze in its history. Budgets have crept up, but not fast enough to keep pace with the big pressures like ageing, and at only a fraction of the rate it has previously required. After the largesse of New Labour, the service initially coped on rations, but this is no longer so: waits are up, operations cancelled and winter is becoming an annual crisis.