{"id":1010,"date":"2006-01-04T19:47:00","date_gmt":"2006-01-04T19:47:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jcm.org.uk\/blog\/2006\/01\/04\/a-cameron-and-the-nhs-quickie\/"},"modified":"2006-01-04T19:47:00","modified_gmt":"2006-01-04T19:47:00","slug":"a-cameron-and-the-nhs-quickie","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jcm.org.uk\/blog\/2006\/01\/a-cameron-and-the-nhs-quickie\/","title":{"rendered":"A Cameron and the NHS quickie"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve put my finger on why Cameron&#8217;s &#8220;the NHS is safe in our hands&#8221; speech sounded a bit odd: <A href=\"http:\/\/news.bbc.co.uk\/1\/hi\/uk_politics\/4578440.stm\">he said<\/a> &#8220;Under a Conservative government, the NHS will remain free at the point of <b>need<\/b>&#8221; &#8211; not, as is traditional, &#8220;at the point of <b>use<\/b>&#8220;.<\/p>\n<p>There&#8217;s a subtle difference there, but potentially an important one. If you started fining the time-wasters, hypochondriacs and people who fail to show up for appointments with doctors, dentists etc., and stopped paying for or subsidising costly but not entirely necessary surgery (for example &#8211; off the top of my head &#8211; the fitting of dental braces, which are themselves subsidised), you may be able to save a modest amount of money while simultaneously making the service more efficient by discouraging misallocation of resources.<\/p>\n<p>Is this what Cameron is intending? The disapproval of the NHS subsiding private treatments is a vague indication that it might be.<\/p>\n<p>Or am I talking absolute bollocks?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve put my finger on why Cameron&#8217;s &#8220;the NHS is safe in our hands&#8221; speech sounded a bit odd: he said &#8220;Under a Conservative government, the NHS will remain free at the point of need&#8221; &#8211; not, as is traditional, &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/jcm.org.uk\/blog\/2006\/01\/a-cameron-and-the-nhs-quickie\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1010","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jcm.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1010","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jcm.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jcm.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jcm.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jcm.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1010"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/jcm.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1010\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jcm.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1010"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jcm.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1010"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jcm.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1010"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}