Here’s A Thought
Now, here’s a thought. Like everyone else I suppose, I get advertisements on my Facebook Feed. Unlike some, perhaps, I don’t particularly mind them, in fact, quite often I learn about useful things on the market I might not otherwise have known about (I’m a sucker for those useful looking gadgets that claim to be able to solve that very problem you didn’t know you had until that ad!) so, I hardly ever block ads.
Over the last year or so, I have started seeing ads. for private healthcare plans. For about £23 a month they appear to guarantee no waiting times for hospital procedures should you ever require them. I’ve not gone into the fine print so don’t really know what sorts of procedures are covered and what aren’t, doubtless there are many caveats and conditions, certainly they talk about surgery and operations, but this set me thinking.
It’s no secret that the NHS is suffering from long waiting times for elective procedures, and reducing if not eliminating the waiting times is a major political goal for every party. These private health care ads. are basically suggesting that the cost of eliminating waiting times is £23 a month. If we multiply this up by the UK working population of around 33 million (1) this comes to £9.1 billion a year. So, at the cost of £9 billon a year waiting times in the NHS could be eliminated, or so these ads. imply.
But wait a minute, I hear you cry, the population of the UK is something like 67 million people, why have you multiplied by only 33 million? Well, not everybody requires hospital care all at the same time and these healthcare companies must have done the sums as to what would it cost to have zero waiting times for those willing to pay and for them to make a (probably) excellent profit. So I think multiplying by the working population will give us a reasonable stab at what it would cost to eliminate waiting times in the NHS. And, it’s just a thought!
How much extra tax would we all have to pay to do the equivalent of taking out this monthly healthcare plan for zero waiting times in the NHS? The annual cost of the healthcare plan is £276. Average income according to the Office for National Statistics is around £35,000 (2). Taking into account the tax-free allowance this means an average tax increase of 1.2%, of course, some would pay less and some would pay more. It would be the government’s job to balance out the tax increase fairly between the less well-paid and the more well-paid, but an average 1.2% doesn’t seem much of an ask to eliminate waiting times. And that’s the beauty of doing this kind of thing through tax. By sharing the burden, all of us can benefit at a cost we can afford. A private scheme only benefits those who can afford it.
£9 billion just happens to be the amount of surplus the Chancellor apparently had at this year’s budget. What did he choose to do with it? Devote it to eliminating the waiting times in the NHS? Of course not, he decided to use it to reduce the National Insurance rate by 2%! What this means is that, going forward, the government has £9 billion less annually to spend on the NHS and, as a result probably, waiting times will get longer! Just a thought.
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