NHS: Govt failure?
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The NHS is back at the centre of hot debate again this weekend, as the Dr Foster report findings generate differences of opinions.
The report finds that 12 NHS hospital trusts in England are “significantly underperforming”, but some have called the conclusions misleading.
From an economic perspective, there are the usual arguments that such a huge monopoly like the NHS is always going to suffer from diseconomies of scale and huge X-inefficiency with communication difficulties; although equity concerns could outweigh this.
In truth, the NHS is such a vast and complex monolith that no single monitoring body can get a completely accurate picture of everything that goes on, and indeed, given the nature of hospital care, it is not clear what “productivity improvements” mean when talking about a hospital - cost-cutting, rejecting high risk operations for fear of falling statistics). On the Economics of Healthcare, this provides a good starting point…
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