I don't want to get party political, as this pretty much applies to all political leaders who make crazy promises about healthcare. It's a global problem, as Obama has found out. This one though is written by Iona Heath, a remarkably insightful President of the Royal College of General Practitioners (2009-2012), and a voice of reason in discussing what she calls 'too much medicine', AKA the overdiagnosis and medicalisation of life. It's not just unaffordable, it actually can cause harm.
This open letter to Gordon Brown, who happened to be the PM at the time, and even by NHS standards was ridiculously spendthrift on things that perhaps were not that useful, is exceptionally good. It's all still applicable. Osteoporosis spending springs to mind, considering Heath's phrase: the extent to which contemporary preventive medicine has got itself trapped on a treadmill of risk factors.
One of the issues I have, as a highly paid NHS staff member, is the constant refrain for more money for the NHS. I'm also a taxpayer and the NHS has buckets of money. It might need more, but before that it needs a review of what it's going on already. So much of the budget is spent on low value interventions and pet projects, spurred on by mysterious 'health planners' in the civil service, various Public Health types, and vested interests.
Picking on my own specialty, in a nutshell, if I do a hip replacement I'm usually providing lasting value.....hip arthroscopy? Not so much.
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