Health Matters | Paul Corrigan's blog

The recent discussion about the US and English health care system has thrown up a number of important facts. Some of them are obvious but some are counterintuitive and need some exploration and discussion.

Whilst we all know that the US spends much more pre head of the population or as a proportion of GDP on their health services than we do, the assumption is that most of this is private expenditure. Surely there is nothing wrong with individuals in a rich country spending their own money on health in the same way as they might spend their money on a third or fourth luxury car. This is private income being spent privately on their health – a set of personal consumer choices.
Read the rest of this entry »

I ended my last post suggesting that the next few months would inevitably have examples of a different politics of the NHS being uncovered within the Conservative party and its supporters  from the one that is David Cameron’s official line. I argued that this would happen because of the long term cultural experience of most people of the right concerning the NHS and how that was at odds with David Cameron’s political strategy.

I thought the next example would be a few weeks away. Instead it occurred the next day and from those people who should be the most disciplined in their support for David Cameron’s strategy, that is the Conservative Prospective Parliamentary Candidates (PPCs).
Read the rest of this entry »

Following on from my last post a number of people have asked me about the relationship between culture and the structure of the politics of the NHS and what might it mean for the politics of the UK over the next few months.

One clear way of understanding culture is that it is the way we do things round here. Since the UK is a diverse society, the way in which we do things round here differs given where ’round here’ is. Scotland does have a different culture from Wales or England and that culture is reflected in its politics. English culture is varied between the north and the south and between rich and poor and is diversified by ethnicity.  Quite often cultures have very little understanding of each other and mainly this doesn’t matter. But when one culture has a lot more power than another then the powerful culture will often blindly impose itself on the other culture and squash it.
Read the rest of this entry »

At the moment, if you are on the left, you rarely get the chance to play a role in developing the political climate of a European country, so to find your politics simultaneously playing a developmental role in the US feel s like the icing on the cake. Then to find reverberations from the US having a positive impact on the politics of England puts the cherry on the top! But such has been the politics of the NHS on both sides of the Atlantic in mid August 2009.
Read the rest of this entry »