La Gran Bretagna in pista per diventare uno “stato sanitario nazionale”, afferma ThinkTank | Fondazione di risoluzione
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2025/jun/12/poorest-to-benefit-from-rachel-reeves-spending-but-tax-rises-likely-says-thinktank
di bugtheft
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Fuck your “agree to cookies or pay bullshit”.
Britain on track to become a ‘National Health State’, says thinktank
Richard Partington
Britain is on track to become a “National Health State” where half of all public spending is allocated to the NHS and social care by the end of the decade, according to a leading thinktank.
Rachel Reeves used her spending review on Wednesday to prioritise billions of pounds for the NHS as she outlined Labour’s priorities up to the next general election, while squeezing funding for other areas.
As the chancellor came under pressure on Thursday to defend her plans, amid warnings that tax rises could be required, the Resolution Foundation said health spending was set to increasingly dominate public spending.
Come the end of the decade, it said that the NHS would account for half (49%) of all day-to-day public service spending controlled by Westminster – up from a third (34%) when Labour last left government in 2010.
The NHS, defence and long-term investment received the lion’s share of the additional funding announced in Reeves’s spending review, with 90% of the increase in the day-to-day budget going to the health service.
However, the Resolution Foundation and other leading experts warned that the chancellor could be forced to raise taxes again in the autumn to maintain higher levels of spending, amid a worsening outlook for the economy and public finances.
The Institute for Fiscal Studies thinktank said on Thursday that a dramatic turnaround in the economy was needed to avoid a fresh rise in taxes at the budget later in the year.
“With spending plans set, and ‘ironclad’ fiscal rules being met by a gnat’s whisker, any move in the wrong direction will almost certainly spark more tax rises,” said Paul Johnson, the director of the IFS.
Official figures on Thursday showed the UK economy shrank by a bigger-than-expected 0.3% in April, as exports fell after Donald Trump’s tariff announcements and employers cut jobs and froze investment plans in response to tax rises and global trade uncertainty.
Kemi Badenoch, the leader of the opposition, blamed Labour for Britain’s worsening economic outlook and argued that the Conservatives would have chosen to shrink the size of the state rather than waging a “war on the private sector”.
However, some economists said Reeves’s policies had mostly reversed the last Conservative government’s “unrealistic” plans, which involved billions of pounds in tax cuts and limited details about how spending would be paid for.
Andy King, a former board member of the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR), said Reeves allocating £400bn more than the previous government had set out over the course of the parliament was “basically the price tag for taking the implausible out of the spending plans”.
“Was it a spending spree? Not really. Was it austerity? Not really. It looks like a pretty conventional and sensible way of allocating the spending envelope,” he added.
The ballooning share of public spending allocated to the NHS comes as the government wrestles to cut near-record waiting lists, on a mission to fix what the health secretary, Wes Streeting, declared to be a “broken” service after 14 years of Conservative rule.
Spending had already been steadily rising for years, reflecting Britain’s ageing population, rising costs, and more complex treatments, while the impact of the Covid pandemic increased pressure on the service. However, critics have questioned whether more efficiency gains could be made.
While the health service is taking up a larger share of public spending, other areas have been steadily squeezed out, including budget cuts of 16% reduction in real, per-person funding for justice and a 50% decline for housing, communities and local government since 2010.
The Resolution Foundation said Reeves’s plans would benefit Britain’s poorest households most, by providing a valuable “benefit-in-kind” from access to public services.
For a middle-income household the benefit would be worth the equivalent of £1,400 a year on average by 2029, rising to £1,700 for the poorest fifth of households in the country.
However, economists warned that a weak growth outlook and rising government borrowing costs amid Trump’s global trade wars could blow the chancellor’s plans off course.
This could force the OBR to downgrade its forecasts for the government finances, which would require Reeves to take action to announce spending cuts or tax rises if she wanted to stick to her fiscal rules.
Ruth Curtice, chief executive of the Resolution Foundation, said: “A weaker economic outlook and the unfunded changes to winter fuel payments mean the chancellor will likely need to look again at tax rises in the autumn.”
I think the phrase is: _Retirement home with aircraft carriers_
They’re desperate to push the narrative of private healthcare being the solution to this.
The NHS will constantly be more expensive as we grow in population especially as our elderly increase in numbers.
This growth in cost has normally been kept up with easily by economic growth providing more funds to government.
Economic stagnation from 2010 onwards has lead to the government having less money to spend per person than compared to pre 2010 and everything is more expensive but not paying for the essentials is not an option.
Austerity, the gift that just keeps taking away.
You win elections by pleasing boomers.
You please boomers with winter fuel payments and health spending.
if young people can’t politically activate in a big way, vote more, protest more, strike more, their futures are going to be ruined as the country bankrupts itself to pay out the massive over promises made to the boomers.
Right wing think tank wants to push privatisation of healthcare? What a shock
ageing population and increasing number of other demographics not looking after themselves of course health care spending is going to soar. But there is a massive amount of waste in the NHS, as a former worker the waste and overstaffing in non frontline departments is mind boggling. That being said, the American PHC companies can fu&k off and keep their ‘for profit’ healthcare models away from this country.
We have the same problem as many nations.
We have an ever increasing elderly population with growing complexity of (see expensive to the state) medical needs, and a limited capacity of working adults that is rapidly declining due to reproduction rates declining (for many reasons) unable to fill the tax burden to pay for all of this shit.
Successive governments have known this was happening for decades and they could have done something proactively to mitigate against this, such as improve conditions to encourage people to want to have kids (say for example not making it a financial burden rather than a blessing to reproduce) – for example Childcare, they could have improved the abysmal mortality rates we have in maternity and premature baby care for non-white British citizens (it’s mostly tied to genetic stuff and medical discrimination) but apparently being among the worst in Europe is fine for us. They could have done something more agressive about the stuff scientists have been stating for years has been causing infant and child death rises along with reproduction rate decreases such as microplastics and air pollution… but we’re still fairly shit at that.
Instead we’re in a doom-cycle economy where we’re faced with ecological and economical apocalypse, shit infrastructure, terrible cost of living due to bad investment in the nation, stuff the government has no control over (wars and disease), stuff the government DOES have control over (helping the rich get richer and poor get poorer), and thanks to the collective effort (that BTW seems to be occuring on a global scale as a result of late-stage capitalism as much of what I’ve spoken about isn’t just limited to the UK), people are waking up and realising that they don’t want to raise kids in a hellscape so decide to not bother at all.
This is particularly an issue for the UK where the state is heavily dependant on everyone “paying their share” because without tax-payers to fill the gap, the whole house of cards collapses. If no-one or not enough people want to have kids, all you are left with are old non-tax payers and wealthy tax dodgers. Where will the government get their social capital from? Because they don’t seem to want to close the tax loopholes, and the elderly aren’t actively earning high wages.
I’m just pointing all this out before people start blaming immigration, because its the governments lack of long-term joined-up planning that has lead to all of our current problems.
The reason for more healthcare spending is a growing and aging population (the ‘boomers’).
Ultimately if you charge for the NHS, the people that pay for it will be the ones who aren’t a child, disabled, on benefits or are over 65. So basically another tax for the people who earn over £25k a year. People who are big earners won’t care as they are likely to have private healthcare.
Care home with a country attached.
It’s not just the growing population of elderly either, lots of sick people of all ages.
People being overweight, vaping epidemic and mental illness will be rampant in the coming decades especially with housing conditions and poor job markets.
People coming here unwell from countries with lesser focus on health and a growing number of children born with disabilities or deformities due to cultural traditions with relations.
The NHS is a money pit, you could sink 100% of tax payer money in, leaving nothing for any other service etc it still wouldnt be enough.
Aging population = more sick people. Do we not have a duty to look after those that looked after us?
The NHS is by far the biggest employer in the UK and the 7th biggest globally. It employs about 6% of the working age population and around 1 in 10 women.
Everyone wants good healthcare but there has to be a limit. The NHS is sucking in ever more money and offering ever worse service. Something has to change because the present trajectory is unsustainable. Spending growth far outstrips population growth.
There are many ways to change the trajectory but they are all going to be unpopular. The obvious one is to raise the basic income tax rate and immediately have a lot more money. The obvious way to “sell” this is that *you* need to contribute if *you* want better services.
Every other country in the world (aside Canada) requires a patient contribution to any treatment. The way this is funded varies but in most of europe it’s a combination of private and public health insurance.
You also have to look at efficiency inside the organisation. There is no natural barrier currently to bureaucratic creep and it continues to expand employment dramatically (up nearly 40% in 15 years) without any obvious improvement in services (https://www.kingsfund.org.uk/insight-and-analysis/data-and-charts/nhs-workforce-nutshell). Some kind of external check is required (payment for treatment would be an obvious one).
You could also restrict the remit of the health service to basic and emergency care and let everything else become privately provisioned. This would be extra unpopular, complex and inefficient.
I don’t know what the answer is but I know that ideology and nostalgia are getting in the way of us having a first world health system.
Incidentally absolutely no one, even Reform loons, are suggesting we follow the US model. That is a straw man touted by the left.
Private healthcare is never the answer. Patients will only be a priority in these systems as a means to generate profits.
We’re a nursing home with nukes. An increasingly large percentage of our population are the elderly, they make up the majority of hospital admissions and generally have more complex healthcare needs so tend to have longer inpatient stays.
Pensioners have it exceedingly well at the moment but something has got to give, hopefully someone will muster up the courage to axe the pension triple lock, it’s unaffordable.
If we can’t afford the NHS then we can’t afford low tax for the rich & super rich. We also need to stop allowing companies to operate in the UK and be treated as being in a lower tax region or taxless state.
It’s because the National Health Service has actually become the **International** health service. We let so many people in it’s simply creates more demand. There’s a ridiculous amount of people commonwealth and family connections to the UK that allows them to come here and get treated for free without having contributed to the state! Even those that aren’t eligible for free treatment get it and then simply don’t pay the bill. We are being taken for a ride by everyone. We are fools lead by clowns.
Let’s see… https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SH.XPD.CHEX.GD.ZS?most_recent_value_desc=true
About 10% of GDP is spent on healthcare. Seems to be broadly in line with peer nations and far less than the US on 16%.
We could spend less with a focus on lifestyle and dietary changes, as well as a greater focus on preventative care.
Not arguing against more NHS funding, but our health system in the UK is bonkers. We are just giving more money at treating poor health without doing nearly enough to tackle the causes of poor health.
Poverty, financial insecurity, and poor quality housing are some of the biggest negative health impacts imaginable. These all got significantly worse under 14 years of Tories + coalition and have yet to get particularly better under the Labour govt.
Access to good-quality, free local services like children’s centres, youth hubs, swimming pools, libraries, etc is also good for your health – but these have also been decimated since 2010 and no sign they are coming back.
Finally, public health and community health provision (like funded support workers for older or disabled people in their homes) was cut to the bone without counting as an NHS cut – but this is all the early intervention and health protection/illness prevention stuff that stops people getting sick(er) and saves the NHS millions in preventative care.
Far cheaper to e.g. pay community nurses to check in on all the older people and make sure they are doing okay than to wait for their conditions to become far worse and wind up in A&E six months later and then take up a hospital bed for months because they don’t have adequate support to be sent home.
There are some good policies coming through – ban on disposable vapes, universal free school meals and breakfast clubs, renters rights bill. But there is no joined-up systemic attempt to make the economy and public work for the populations health rather than against it
i can just imagine what private healthcare would end up like, just look at thames water
The “Think Tank” being the Rosultion Foundation, who key donors include the head of Huffield Health and BUPA.
Fuck off.
The NHS would only need half of the money it does at the moment if people stopped eating crap food, getting fat, along with all the medical issues that brings and looked after themselves and took a bit more responsibility for their own actions.
There is an attitude now that I can eat as much as I want, whatever I want and the NHS will pick up the pieces and make me better later.
People getting fatter and needing more medical treatment – I think there is a correlation there somewhere, and Im no brain surgeon.
It already WAS a national health state since the late 1940s. It’s been starved of funds for ~40 years.
We need to just start building industry in the North again. The decline of the UK is just the story of London stealing from everywhere else to pay for its amazing transportation network and its expensive wages.
This is the result of the economically ‘liberal’ changes brought elsewhere in society, crushing quality of life and the means to acquire a better and healthier life.
Neoliberalism is in some ways a never-ending covid.