Health economist Professor Alan Maynard asks what regulation is actually delivering

Public and private sector regulatory schizophrenia
There are two remarkable aspects of regulation.

Firstly, regulations are costly and usually created to protect and benefit the public, i.e. they usually involve significant costs and benefits. Those favouring their abolition generally assume deregulation is virtually costless in the absence of evidence.

Health economist Professor Alan Maynard offers an August examination result on Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt’s tenure

Jeremy Hunt has been Secretary Of State For Health since 2012 - over 5 years. In grading his performance, it is essential to examine the policies he has championed and progress he has made.

Before you read this, what grade would you give him?

Hunt’s policies

Amidst Brexit and the plethora of Government initiatives following May's June General Election, there is ambiguity about whether (even if desired by voters) it is possible to roll back austerity and restore public services.

Is the smaller state desired by Cameron and Osborne and produced since 2010 here to stay?

Background

Health economist Professor Alan Maynard is far from convinced that things are working out well

The NHS is in crisis due to inadequate funding: a product of ideologically driven policy choices favouring a smaller public sector. The crisis is the familiar product of competing political parties and the famines and feasts in funding, often of biblical durations of seven years.

Health economist Professor Alan Maynard calls Mayday on Number 10's health and care policy position

Hans Christian Anderson’s tale of the Emperor being tricked by two weavers into selling a magic set of clothes that did not exist led to their victim being “naked as the day that he was born”, and subject to universal ridicule.

After six months in office, Prime Minister May appears to have no clothes and is subject to increasing ridicule. Admittedly, her agenda is broad and dominated by bewilderment about how to manage Brexit.

Health economist Professor Alan Maynard would much rather not have to write this article again, but evidently it's still necessary. Sigh.

After six years of inadequate funding of the NHS, waiting lists are worsening. Workforce problems are acute, and 65 per cent of hospital trusts were in deficit at year end 2015-16.

It is remarkable that service provision has maintained such reasonable levels when health and social care funding has been so parsimonious.

Health economist Professor Alan Maynard teaches Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt a little about efficiency.

What is efficiency?

On September 11th, I tweeted: "Health care that is delivered inefficiently is unethical as it deprives potential patients of care from which they could benefit".

On September 15th, a young chap called Jeremy Hunt tweeted in reply "This is why safe, high quality and efficient care must go hand in hand”.

Health economist Professor Alan Maynard wonders, not for the first time, whether we shouldn't perhaps be evaluating some of the latest round of NHS redisorganisation

You will recall that Comrade Lansley’s 2012 Health and Social Care Act redisorganising the structures of the NHS and was described by Comrade Sir David Nicholson as, like the Great Wall of China, being visible from outer space.

Health economist Professor Alan Maynard wonder, not for the first time, why policymaking and management are still so often uninformed by evidence and evaluation.

The healthcare industry nationally and internationally is vast and expensive. Insurers and governments worldwide spend a lot of effort seeking to control expenditure growth, using rhetoric rather than evidence to improve the efficiency with which healthcare is delivered.

Health economist Professor Alan Maynard points to the parlous pricing function, cost and value

The admirable Steamship NHS Titanic is being driven into the iceberg territory of fragmentation and privatisation by Admiral The Hunt. After five years of parsimonious annual funding growth of 0.8 per cent, good ship NHS is in dire straits, with rivets pinging from previously robust component parts.