NHS failure is hurting the economy. Only higher taxes will break the cycle.

Last Friday I read a rather shocking article in the FT by John Burn-Murdoch pointing out that, uniquely amongst major economies, the number of inactive people of working age in Britain is still rising even as covid subsides. In the EU the number of inactive people has already returned to below the pre-pandemic trend line; in the US the number of inactive people is still above this trend line, but it is falling. About 300,000 people are missing from the UK workforce. The author draws a connection with NHS waiting lists, where a similar number of people have been waiting for more than a year for an NHS operation to deal with a chronic condition. You don’t have to accept the exact causal link between between these figures to understand that a poorly functioning health system affects the size of the economy. The scale of pain implied by the backlogs in NHS care, and the difficulty people have in accessing it, including primary care and mental health services, should make this enough of political priority. But even those who say the economy trumps all else should be taking notice.

Two important insights about the current British economy seem to elude many commentators. The first is that the dominant factor affecting the size of the economy, and hence economic growth, is the number of people that are in work. As I discussed in my recent post on Dietrich Wallrath’s book Fully Grown, this factor trumps all others, and in particularlar changes in productivity. It follows that anybody who cares about growth should focus on this factor above all else. It is why childcare policies are so important, to say nothing of immigration and retirement. It follows that the persistent shrinkage in the UK workforce through the covid pandemic must be an important contributor to the country’s lack of economic performance. The second insight is that Britain is facing a supply side crunch, which is why unemployment is low at the same time as inflation is becoming widespread through the economy, and not just focused on things like energy costs. And following Brexit, international trade (and migration) is much less of a safety valve for imbalances between supply and demand. This means that anything reducing the size of the workforce really matters. And that makes the state of the nation’s health doubly important.

It is evident that Britain is experiencing a health crisis. The NHS is failing to deal with the pressures it is under, and as for policies to stop people getting ill in the first place, that gets scarcely any attention at all. The surge in demand, combined with pressure on supply, arising from the pandemic has broken a system that was already under stress. The direct effect of the pandemic – in terms people getting ill – does not seem to differ all that much from many other countries. The issue is that other country’s health systems seem to be more resilient.

Why should this be the case? The main reason is surely that the country does not spend as much on health care as other developed countries. In an ONS study on comparative health spending based on 2017 data, only Italy spent less per head among the G7 countries. This study also pointed out that the proportion of the spend that was publicly financed (about 80%) was amongst the highest – though in the Nordic countries and Japan it was higher. The two countries in the OECD with the highest overall health spend per capita, Switzerland (about 40% higher than the UK) and the US (about double) had amongst the lowest public contributions. This points to the central paradox of the NHS: the arrangement of care being free at the point of use, combined with an effective monopoly of state provision, causes the country to spend less on health rather than more – because it makes private contribution harder. Why would you pay for treatment that you can get free? You aren’t allowed to top up NHS care with your own money to get better treatment or priority. But if people are driven to use private care because the NHS is inadequate, private care infrastructure starts to undermine the public one – and the universal consent that is the basis of the NHS starts to break down. This has already happened to dentistry and optometry. A recent BBC study has shown that more and more people are going private out of frustration with NHS waiting times, in many cases causing significant financial hardship. So this is a growing threat.

Britain probably took a wrong turning with the design of its health system in the 1940s. Other countries have found a better balance between public and private finance, and deliver better health outcomes overall – though the US shows that you should not equate health spend with health outcomes. But that is a useless insight. It is inconceivable that the country moves to one of the public insurance-based systems (Netherlands and Australia are often spoken of as exemplars) that seem work better. There is only one way to solve the problem and that is to expand the public budget to take up a higher share of the national income. This was the solution hit upon by Tony Blair when he was prime minister in the early 2000s – which it must be said was one of his most successful insights, even though it went against political orthodoxy – he had to outmanoeuvre his chancellor Gordon Brown bring it about. The problem, of course, is how to fund it (or, if you are a follower of Modern Monetary Theory – how to prevent the policy being inflationary). When Mr Blair pushed the policy through, the country was going through a largely illusory period of economic growth, and no hard choices were required as tax revenues were buoyant. But a big problem arose when the bubble popped in the Great Financial Crisis, and much of the government’s tax revenues vanished. Since then governments have sought to protect the size of the NHS budget, but without letting it reflecting increased demand arising from the higher proportion of older people. Meanwhile other public services that affect demand for the NHS, like social care and public health, were squeezed. Meanwhile the country’s growth prospects were dented by those same demographics, to say nothing of the ending of cheap Chinese imports and Brexit, and various other headwinds. The inescapable conclusion is that core taxes (Income Tax, National Insurance, and VAT) must go up to provide health services with the resources they need to meet public demand.

Only shadows of this awkward political choice seem to be affecting the Conservative leadership debate. Rishi Sunak defends the recent rise in NI on the basis that it is needed to fund the NHS to help overcome its covid backlog, and then to improve social care. But this extra funding is inadequate. Liz Truss persists in suggesting that taxes should come down immediately, and stay down, as this will unleash growth and higher tax revenues overall. Though she doesn’t suggest cutting spending, it is not hard to see that this is where that path leads. Both place hope in productivity miracles in the health system to square the circle. Neither want to touch the idea of intrusive regulation to help the country avoid health hazards such as junk food. This position is not necessarily incoherent. Many conservatives think we should push health choices and their consequences out of the public realm and into that of individual responsibility. Such people would not be unhappy with the rise of a two-tier health system with the rise of private care increasingly dealing with the requirements of the better off. It is, of course, a policy that dare not speak its name.

And yet Labour, and the Lib Dems for that matter, are no better. They may accept the ethos of an effective and properly funded public health system, including preventative health interventions (though tastes for this vary) – but they will not say that this requires core taxes to go up. It is easy to blame devious politicians, right, left and centre for this failure to confront the hard choices about the national health. But the problem clearly goes deeper. Conservatives don’t talk about strangling the NHS in the name of individual agency, and Labour doesn’t talk about serious tax rises to boost health funding, because each of these policies would be politically suicidal. The political system crushes minority political views, which both of these are, in the all-or-nothing electoral system. The public has no apetite for political straight talking of this sort. It’s been hard enough to get people used to the idea that stopping climate change means changing our way of life. Health policy, or the awkward choices it entails, does not get anything like this attention. Initially leadership on this kind of issue is required from outside the main political parties. But I hear nothing.

And so we face the prospect of a vicious circle, with the health system and the economy bringing each other down.