Tax-funded NHS 'the best way'

THE enormous pressures which the health service faces over the next 20 years are made clear today in the long-awaited Wanless report of the future of the NHS.

The report, said the Chancellor today, is the key to the Government's spending plans on health.

Derek Wanless, former chief executive of NatWest, who as asked last year by Gordon Brown to look at the health service, comes down firmly in favour of a healthcare system funded out of general taxation. He argued that it is fairer and more cost-efficient than methods based on private insurance used abroad.

'My conclusion is that there is no evidence that any alternative financing method to the UK's would deliver a given quality of healthcare at a lower cost to the economy,' he writes.

But he makes it clear that the costs could rise significantly in future as the baby boom generation grows older, plagued by health problems resulting from a sedentary lifestyle, and as people demand much higher standards.

A 'significant quality gap exists at the moment', Mr Wanless concludes, as his report shows that the UK fares worse than seven other countries - France, Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden, Australia, Canada and New Zealand - when it comes to survival rates for breast cancer, lung cancer, and life expectancy.

The UK's population is predicted to increase by around five million over the next 20 years, and at the same time, medical advances will push up costs. There will be technology such as stem cell therapy which offer the prospect of treating diseases thought incurable.

People like the health service, with four out of five of it seeing it as 'critical to British society' according to Mori poll research carried out for the Wanless study.