{"id":24971,"date":"2014-06-02T07:59:23","date_gmt":"2014-06-02T06:59:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/?p=24971"},"modified":"2014-06-02T07:59:38","modified_gmt":"2014-06-02T06:59:38","slug":"ive-seen-the-future-of-the-nhs-and-its-fraudulent","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/2014\/06\/02\/ive-seen-the-future-of-the-nhs-and-its-fraudulent\/","title":{"rendered":"I’ve seen the future of a privatised NHS, and its fraudulent"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Economist published a story on \u00a0Saturday on the cost of fraud in the US healthcare system. \u00a0As they noted<\/a>:<\/p>\n

In America the scale of medical embezzlement is extraordinary. According to Donald Berwick, the ex-boss of Medicare and Medicaid (the public health schemes for the old and poor), America lost between $82 billion and $272 billion in 2011 to medical fraud and abuse (see\u00a0article<\/a>). The higher figure is 10% of medical spending and a whopping 1.7% of GDP\u2013as if robbers had made off with the entire output of Tennessee or nearly twice the budget of Britain\u2019s National Health Service (NHS).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I have to say that whoever \u00a0wrote this article clearly did not know the cost of the NHS, which now amounts to \u00a3140 billion a year, \u00a0but that aside this is a staggering story.<\/p>\n

The first \u00a0thing to always ask is whether it is credible. \u00a0In my opinion, it is. A fraud rate of 10% \u00a0already exists, in my opinion,<\/a> within the entire \u00a0private sector in the UK \u00a0so I can see no reason why, if health care was privatised, that error rate could not occur within that system. And the fact \u00a0US healthcare costs almost twice as much as UK healthcare as a proportion of GDP with, overall, little better outcome for the population as a whole, must in part be explained by this fraud rate ( and the enormous costs of administration \u00a0and inefficiency that its market system creates).<\/p>\n

The second thing to ask is whether or \u00a0not this error rate could be replicated within the NHS. \u00a0Again, the obvious answer appears to be that \u00a0this is entirely foreseeable. \u00a0We have, after all, already seen \u00a0serious cases of fraudulent misrepresentation of activities undertaken \u00a0and of misinvoicing by outsourcing companies within the UK, \u00a0which would appear to be \u00a0the basis for much of this US fraud.<\/p>\n

In that case if \u00a0you want to see the future of a substantially privatised NHS just look at what is happening in \u00a0the USA \u00a0and you will see exactly what we will get. \u00a0It won't be better health care, but there will be massive fraud.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Economist published a story on \u00a0Saturday on the cost of fraud in the US healthcare system. \u00a0As they noted: In America the scale of
 Read the full article…<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[128],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-24971","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-nhs"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24971","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=24971"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24971\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=24971"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=24971"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=24971"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}