Nigel Farage caught admitting he would privatise NHS

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UKIP is committed to keeping the NHS free at the point of delivery. Indeed, that was a major point of the UKIP North West conference thast I attended the other week.

See here:

http://www.ukip.org/labour_s_endless_li ... esperation

By the way: the Guardian used my recordings without asking me! Cheeky gits!

So, Farage isn't a nazi after all. That explains his support for Israel.

Privatize public healthcare? As a dutchman I'll only say "take a look at dutch healthcare and see how well that panned out".

What an utter mess...

I've been studying health economics. Free markets fail when it comes to health because in order to work they require many assumptions that are not fulfilled in health. Some of these include imperfect information (free markets assume that consumers have perfect information as to how utility can be maximised, but health is so complex and uncertain that people don't have this information even if they are medically trained - how do you know when you might become ill?), lack of externalities (free markets assume that people maximise their own utility, but efficency assumptions do not hold if benefits accrue to other people e.g. vaccinations benefit the whole population not just the people having them) and the rarity of perfect competition (which according to economic theory is the only efficient mechanism for maximising utility, yet just doesn't work in healthcare because of the need for quality controls, patents to cover the costs of drug development and the huge role that non-profit organisations hold due to the feeling that most people have that healthcare should be available regardless of means).

It is sad to see people swayed by the free market ideology when it comes to health - if only they had studied health economics to any extent (rather than just pure economics) they would realise how poorly health fits into the traditional neoliberal framework. The NHS is underfunded to an extent, but it is more efficient than other health services in the developed world and does not need radical change. Incremental improvements based on scientific methods should be sufficient to keep pace with increasing demands. We do not need huge reorganisations based on inaccurate ideologies. Neoliberal economics is a beautiful theory, but it so rarely actually works in practice, and to base the running of public services on such a theoretical background is quite frankly bizarre.