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Julian Tudor Hart Socialist Health Association, pounds sterling6, pp 112 ISBN 0 900687 24 X
As the march of the NHS reforms continues and it increasingly looks as though Tony Blair's "New Labour party"-basically the old (pre-Thatcher) Tory party-will do little to reverse the process, Julian Tudor Hart dares to declare that the emperor has no clothes.
Having learnt that if nonsense is repeated often enough it becomes common knowledge, advocates of the reforms suggest that the NHS had become a bloated bureaucracy, with too much money spent on administration and too little on patient care. The British system, however, has been considerably cheaper, in terms of the percentage of gross national product it consumes, than competition based systems elsewhere. The reforms threaten to remove this advantage as expenditure on managers grows apace. The British health service resulted in operations such as cholecystectomy being performed in a rational fashion. Operations were more common in areas where need-determined by the prevalence of...