Unhealthy Expectations?
Analysis
BBC
4.6 • 1K Ratings
🗓️ 30 May 2011
⏱️ 29 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Is our NHS debate avoiding the key issue? The talk is of another reorganisation of the NHS and greater efficiencies enabling the NHS in England to face the future. But the overall challenge goes much deeper, and the politicians dare not address it. As well as the pressures of demography and inflation in health care costs, the health service faces what it has always faced - public expectation of ever better health care means an ever greater proportion of our national wealth has been spent on health. Now it is said that this must simply stop. But does this hope - one in a long history of so far unrealised hopes -simply obscure the more painful reality. One way or another, privately or publicly, our health care ambitions have to be paid for, and we are failing to decide how.
In 'Unhealthy Expectations' Michael Blastland looks at how this problem has loomed for years but never been faced - at least not in open political debate. He explores what the real choices are if constantly improved care is to be provided - and whether this must mean either much higher personal taxes or a population prepared to pay much directly for care. Or is there a realistic way of squaring the circle of rising demand within fixed budgets? If something has to give, then what? Will you give up your expectations?
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Just before this BBC podcast gets underway, here's something you may not know. |
| 0:04.7 | My name's Linda Davies and I Commission Podcasts for BBC Sounds. |
| 0:08.5 | As you'd expect, at the BBC we make podcasts of the very highest quality featuring the most knowledgeable experts and genuinely engaging voices. |
| 0:18.0 | What you may not know is that the BBC makes podcasts about all kinds of things like pop stars, |
| 0:24.6 | poltergeist, cricket, and conspiracy theories and that's just a few examples. |
| 0:29.7 | If you'd like to discover something a little bit unexpected, find your next podcast over at BBC |
| 0:35.4 | Sounds. |
| 0:36.4 | Thank you for downloading this podcast from the BBC. |
| 0:39.7 | For terms and conditions please go to our website at BBC.co. |
| 0:44.1 | UK. |
| 0:45.1 | Now the first in a new series of analysis. |
| 0:48.4 | The government's proposed changes to the National Health Service in England are prompting |
| 0:52.3 | much political discussion, but is it all |
| 0:54.7 | avoiding the real issue? Michael Blasland presents unhealthy expectations. |
| 1:01.1 | This NHS bill are you well bored? |
| 1:07.0 | Bored by the privatization squabble, alleged, denied, pro-ante, whatever, nor much fuss by commissioning structures. |
| 1:15.1 | This program will suggest that you have good reason to be bored. |
| 1:18.4 | We'll wonder if the bill is, I'll state it provocatively, why not, irrelevant. |
| 1:23.0 | There is a far bigger issue in health care that, unlike the bill, affects the whole UK. |
| 1:29.0 | John Appleby is chief economist at the Kings Fund, a health think tank. |
| 1:34.6 | I think that it's completely feasible to think of the UK possibly spending around a third of its entire economic wealth on health care |
| 1:46.7 | over the next 50 plus years. |
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