Abstract
This chapter outlines and explains the major costs associated with the market reforms from the Thatcher era to the Lansley reforms in the Coalition era. The lack of benefit to justify such cost has been a major own-goal for health policy and a major source of waste, the avoidance of which could have left the NHS in better shape before the ‘arctic’ era of fiscal retrenchment from 2010 onwards, following the financial ‘crash’ of 2008–2009 and the election of a Conservative-led Coalition government in 2010. The Covid pandemic ten years later hit an NHS which was already on the ropes. The Blair government’s genuine and significant improvements to the NHS make it seem like a golden age by comparison with today. But had that government avoided debilitating and costly reform which was (at best) peripheral to the improvement of the NHS, today’s health service, while still in trouble, would have had just that bit more capacity for resilience.
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Paton, C. (2022). The Cost of the Market. In: NHS Reform and Health Politics in the UK. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-99818-9_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-99818-9_5
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