Why the NHS is bad for us
Another lonely death. Another preventable death. Another reason why you must challenge your most deeply held beliefs.

Last week's report into the case of Thomas Rogers, the 74-year-old grandfather who bled to death after lying undiagnosed on a trolley in an accident and emergency ward at Whipps Cross Hospital for nine hours, is shocking. What is even more shocking is that it is hardly unusual. Equally awful stories worm their way out past NHS obstruction every week. And nothing changes.

Even as you read this, in almost every hospital in the country, there will be elderly, vulnerable people left for hours and sometimes days on trolleys. Each year, thousands of British people - the young, the old, the rich, the poor - die unnecessarily from lack of diagnosis, lack of treatment and lack of drugs. They die and suffer unnecessarily for different reasons, but there is just one root cause: the blind faith the Government has in the ideology of the National Health Service, and our unwillingness to accept not just that it doesn't work, but that it can never work. Bernard Kouchner, the health minister of France, widely thought of as having the best health system in the world, recognised this last week when he condemned the NHS as 'medieval' and 'intolerable'.

I used to be a believer. I grew up cocooned in the affection and pride that the British public had in the NHS, the glorious creation of postwar Britain that offered free, modern health care to all. Poor and rich got equal treatment; no longer would health depend on wealth. It was the only institution, it was claimed, that worked on an ethical principle.

But then, two years ago, I became health editor of The Observer , the very same day that Alan Milburn became Health Secretary. And what I have learnt about the health service and its workings has appalled me and completely eroded my faith in the NHS. Bombarded by the desperate pain of relatives and medical professionals, challenged by endless think-tanks, semi nars and government initiatives, I struggled with my beliefs like a troubled Catholic, until I came to the only conclusion that my heart, intellect and integrity would allow me: we must abolish the NHS as we know it, abandon our unique obsession that all health care should be free, and become as comfortable with mixed public and private medicine as they are elsewhere in the developed world. My beliefs make me a heretic among the Left. ...

...It is inevitable that a state monopoly offering free services will treat patients like mindless sheep, forcing them to accept whatever they are given, and it deprives the health service of a powerful force for good. The determination of sick people and their relatives to find the best treatment and care is wondrous to behold, but this energy is not harnessed by the NHS but crushed by it, forcing people into soul-destroying battles. The desire of millions of patients to improve their treatment should be a huge power for reform in the NHS, but, instead, reform is driven by civil servants sitting in offices in Whitehall issuing diktats. ...