Arrow in memoriam

K. J. Arrow passed away this Wednesday. He is one of the giants of economics and the founder of health economics. It is difficult to summarise his works in few words. You'll find obituaries in the Post and NYT. Josep M. Colomer has written an interesting post in his blog (social choice perspective). Tony Culyer has published also his obituary (health economics perspective)

An interview in a recent book reviews his works and opinions. Regarding healt economics, he says:

I was asked to study, as a theoretical economist, health care. This was a paper that I regard very highly, one of the best things I ever did. I think I mentioned that in fact, afair amount of my research is the result of people asking me these kinds of questions. I studied Social Choice because somebody asked me a question. A now retired professor, Victor Fuchs, was then at the Ford Foundation, and they wanted to get studies done of social problems. They wanted studies of welfare—in the ordinary sense of the word—of medical care and of education. For each of these areas, they wanted one study by somebody who had worked in the field and one by a theorist, and I’m a theorist who had not necessarily worked with people.

In my case, I was asked to work on medical care. I read up on the literature, and gradually a pattern emerged that essentially the parties know different things. The physician knows a lot that the patient doesn’t, and therefore the patient can’t check on the quality of medical care in the same way we buy a loaf of bread. It’s not like I’ll buy that loaf again. But with medical care, you can’t be sure because you don’t know that much. It’s the same thing between the insurer and the physician or the patient. So I said that with medical care, noneconomic factors, essentially ethical codes, play a role in keeping the system together. But I didn’t have a theory at the time, I just had a statement. It was pretty clear to me that non-economic factors do play a major role. What is considered good practice, that’s what keeps the system going. The trouble is that I’ve seen the limits of economic analysis. I could see one solution, but it was very different from market kinds of solutions. But I did have a theory about it.

When I look at other people, they don’t have theories either, or they have rather vague theories. When I try to impart this to students, of course it’s a very confusing message. That’s one of the reasons I don’t think I’ve been a great teacher. I’ve perhaps had students who did appreciate what I was doing, although they tended to pick up the more technical parts of it. I’m a little disappointed they haven’t tried to tackle the broader picture. If they’re working with it, they’ve done very fine work, going well beyond what I did. So I’d say that would be a rather lengthy answer to your question. I see myself primarily as a scholar, as a thinker about things, trying to enlist others in this thinking. Yes, I think I would say that more so than others.

PS. Arrow in my posts

Genome editing, closer than you think

Human Genome Editing Science, Ethics, and Governance

Last week the US patent office ruled that hotly disputed patents on the CRISPR revolutionary genome-editing technology belong to the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT. In a former post I explained the dispute. Genome editing in my opinion shouldn't be patented and will see exactly the impact of such ruling in US and elsewhere in the next future.
If you want to know in detail what does genome editing means for the future of life sciences, have a look at NASEM book.

It is now possible to insert or delete single nucleotides,interrupt a gene or genetic element, make a single-stranded break in DNA, modify a nucleotide, or make epigenetic changes to gene expression. In the realm of biomedicine, genome editing could be used for three broad purposes: for basic research, for somatic interventions, and for germline interventions.

CRISPR (which stands for clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats) refers to short, repeated segments of DNA originally discovered in bacteria. These segments provided the foundation for the development of a system that combines short RNA sequences paired with Cas9 (CRISPR associated protein 9, an RNA-directed nuclease), or with similar nucleases, and can readily be programmed to edit specific segments of DNA. The CRISPR/Cas9 genome-editing system offers several advantages over previous strategies for making changes to the genome and has been at the center of much discussion concerning how genome editing could be applied to promote human health.

I would just want to say that these patents destroy the soul of science, since access should be available with no barriers for the development of  innovation. Patents are not the incentive for discovery in this case, as I explained in my post, natural processes should'nt be patented. And this is why today is a really sad day.

PS. My posts against patents

Michael Kiwanuka. Home again

An article that surpasses publication bias

Evaluación de la efectividad de un programa de atención integrada y proactiva a pacientes crónicos complejos

Publication bias (Wikipedia dixit): Publication bias is a type of bias that occurs in published academic research. It occurs when the outcome of an experiment or research study influences the decision whether to publish or otherwise distribute it. Publication bias matters because literature reviews regarding support for a hypothesis can be biased if the original literature is contaminated by publication bias. Publishing only results that show a significant finding disturbs the balance of findings

We've just surpassed such conventional view and have published a new article on integrated care and I've prepared a short post in the blog of Gaceta Sanitaria (in castillian):

La integración asistencial a examen

Todo estudio experimental tiene un contexto, y antes de entrar en el detalle resulta crucial comprenderlo para evaluar sus resultados. Hay dos términos usuales en la política sanitaria de nuestros días: integración asistencial y cronicidad. En Gaceta Sanitaria encontrareis el artículo: “Evaluación de la efectividad de un programa de atención integrada y proactiva a pacientes crónicos complejos”. El programa tiene lugar en el Baix Empordà, en una organización sanitaria integrada y si comparamos indicadores de utilización y calidad seleccionados (Tabla 4) observaremos que superan sustancialmente la media del sistema sanitario público catalán. Este ya es un primer reto en sí mismo, mejorar cuando se parte de una posición de ventaja relativa.

Los profesionales están acostumbrados a dos décadas de práctica asistencial integrada. Esto significa que cualquier aproximación organizativa alternativa se internaliza y se difunde, lo que dificulta aislar el impacto.

Se aplicó un modelo predictivo que resultó ser el punto de partida para la selección de pacientes. Es previsible que en un futuro próximo sea posible la estimación probabilística de trayectorias y episodios para los enfermos crónicos complejos. Esto nos aportaría mayor precisión a la estratificación dinámica de pacientes.

Las conclusiones del estudio muestran ligeras reducciones en la utilización hospitalaria fruto del programa. Pero mantienen patrones similares entre los distintos grupos sujetos a intervención. Es por ello que destacaría dos afirmaciones del artículo: “una situación general de alta calidad asistencial previa y mantenida en el ámbito de la intervención, y una inevitable contaminación entre grupos,  dificultaron la demostración de una efectividad marginal del programa” y “la estratificación de la población con una identificación explícita de los pacientes crónicos complejos puede ayudar a avanzar los resultados, y el criterio clínico los hace  extensivos a todos los pacientes de características similares”.

Esto nos lleva a confirmar las dificultades de los estudios experimentales en los que deseamos probar el impacto de un cambio organizativo. Este estudio sería candidato a no ser publicado, porque su resultado mantiene una ambivalencia y no permite pronunciarse con claridad sobre la opción defendida con carácter general en nuestros días: la superioridad de la atención integrada y proactiva de los pacientes crónicos complejos frente a otras alternativas. Sin embargo, su publicación además de alertar sobre la dificultad de este tipo de estudios, nos señala nuevas pistas.  Más allá de los cambios en la utilización y coste que representa la integración asistencial, necesitamos medir los resultados en salud y la calidad en los episodios asistenciales, comprender el impacto en salud de estas estrategias organizativas. Esta es la tarea más relevante y sobre la que se deberían enfocar nuevos estudios. Es por ello que las investigaciones las estamos centrando en la medida de los cambios en la esperanza de vida de buena salud a lo largo del tiempo y en la medida de los episodios. Este tipo de medidas agregadas, junto con otras de carácter fisiológico y de percepción de salud y bienestar tienen que permitir alcanzar una visión más completa de lo que aporta la integración asistencial.

A tribute to the great Jim Croce (1942-1973)

Satisfaction guaranteed (at a high price)

Euro Health Consumer Index 2016

The survey has a clear message: the more you have choice on healthcare, the more you are satisfied (in general). The Netherlands leads the ranking every year in the last decade. The european countries that spend most on health per capita are Luxembourg (6.023€), Germany (4.003€) and Netherlands (3.983€). Luxembourg lies behind in satisfaction, while Switzerland (choice) is in the second position and the third is for Norway (not so strong in choice).
Choice may provide satisfaction, but you have to agree on a model that supports it, and be able to pay the bill. Personally, I'm not so sure about choice as a general construct to support decision making and satisfaction, a former post explains my doubts.
Long time ago the European Union made surveys on satisfaction, and decided to stop, because it was an easy policy tool for the opponents. Right now we do have only the Euro Health Consumer Index 2016. Unfortunately you'll not find data on Catalonia, it will appear in a next edition.

Superbe!
Andrea Motis and her new album

A prescription for “high-need, high-cost” patients

David Blumenthal presented at the recent  OECD health conference the Commonwealth Fund report: Designing a High-Performing Health Care System for Patients with Complex Needs: Ten Recommendations for Policymakers
These are the recommendations:

1. Make care coordination a high priority for patients with complex needs
2. Identify patients at greatest need of proactive, coordinated care
3. Train more primary care physicians and geriatricians
4. Improve communication between providers, e.g. integrated clinical records
5. Engage patients in decisions about their care
6. Provide better support for carers
7. Redesign funding mechanisms for patients with complex needs
8. Integrate health and social care, and physical and mental healthcare
9. Engage clinicians in change, train and support clinical leaders
10.Learn from experience; scale up successful projects

Once again, the issue is not about what, but about how, according to the specific setting. This is the reason why change implies modify incentives and coordination mechanisms. This is the hardest part, with cost and benefits uneven distributed over time and people. And this is the reason why recommendations fail so often in its implementation.

At Tate Britain, righ now, David Hockney

Common challenges and responses to improve healthcare quality

Caring for quality in health: Lessons learnt from 15 reviews of health care quality

Towards actionable international comparisons of health system performance:expert revision of the OECD framework and quality indicators

Key messages from the last OECD report on quality:

Systemic changes on where and how health care is delivered will optimise both quality and efficiency
Lesson 1: High-performing health care systems offer primary care as a specialist service that provides comprehensive care to patients with complex needs
Lesson 2: Patient-centred care requires more effective primary and secondary prevention in primary care.
Lesson 3: High-quality mental health care systems require strong health information systems and mental health training in primary care
Lesson 4: New models of shared care are required to promote co-ordination across health and social care systems

Health care systems need to engage patients as active players in improving health care, while modernising the role of health professionals
Lesson 5: A strong patient voice is a priority to keep health care systems focussed on quality when financial pressures are acute
Lesson 6: Measuring what matters to people delivers the outcomes that patients expect
Lesson 7: Health literacy helps drive high-value care
Lesson 8: Continuous professional development and evolving practice maximise the contribution of health professionals

Health care systems need to better employ transparency and incentives as key quality-improvement tools
Lesson 9: High-performing health care systems have strong information infrastructures that are linked to quality-improvement tools
Lesson 10: Linking patient data is a pre-requisite for improving quality across pathways of care
Lesson 11: External evaluation of health care organisation needs to be fed into continuous quality-improvement cycles
Lesson 12: Improving patient safety requires greater effort to collect, analyse and learn from adverse events

It may sound as a dejà-vu, and the difficult part is how, not what to do to improve quality. However if you want to read an article on health care quality comparisons, check this one. Comparing quality is crucial because we are used to compare expenditure without a detailed knowledge of quality achievement. We'll have to follow next reports on the issue.

The coverage of health risk and the extent of generosity

The Right to Health A Multi-Country Study of Law, Policy and Practice

If we look at European Union, the right to health is heterogeneous. The size of the difference among countries depends on many factors, and path dependence explains mostly such diversity. If you want to check beyond EU, a new book explains how countries define health risck coverage under different arrangements.

Looking at health through a human rights lens tells us something about the nature of illness that epidemiology and biology cannot: it encourages us to consider to what extent illness is unjust. It also frames illness and disease within the political, social, cultural, and economic conditions that surround it; considers the power dynamics that perpetuate illness and disease; and focuses the attention on marginalized and vulnerable groups that may exist outside of medical research priorities or beyond the target demographics of political decisions, at greatest risk of becoming invisible. Worse still, history has shown us that in extreme situations medical professionals can be used as tools of the state to cover up or even inflict abuse. Considering the complex relationship between justice and health, using the international framework for the right to health offers the possibility of mitigating some of the effects of deeply embedded inequalities and discrimination and promoting environments in which anyone can achieve their highest level of health.

There is a major misunderstanding about the frame of the right to health. Somebody should specify that we are talking mostly of right to health care and state at the same time about the individual duties on health. Anyway, let's imagine a country that close to 2% of population are il.legal immigrants that have the right to health care accepted as any citizen, this is my country.  Unfortunately such unique level of generosity and solidarity you'll not find it in this book:

PS. Somebody should ask at the same time if going beyond such level of generosity is financially sustainable. However this is an inconvenient question, a politically incorrect one.

PS. Good post.This Economic Phenomenon Is Making Government Sick and this one

The future of health statistics

RECOMMENDATIONS TO OECD MINISTERS OF HEALTH FROM THE HIGH LEVEL REFLECTION GROUP ON THE FUTURE OF HEALTH STATISTICS

You may find information on quality of healthcare in many websites. Catalonia has developed a broad strategy in this topic. You may check "Central de Resultats", and you'll find details about it. However, what about patients perspectives on quality?.
OECD has started an approach known as Patient Reported indicators survey. We'll have to wait for more details, but this initiative will cover a range of topics that provider led information forgets.
And this approach is only a tool from a wide set of recommendations about the future of health statistics. Sounds good.

Miró- Projecte per Catalunya

 Don't miss the next auction in Sotheby's, it could be yours

The endogenous democide of Spain

From Theorising Democide: Why and How Democracies Fail:

Ko Maeda has made the case that ‘research on the determinants of democratic durability can be advanced by paying closer attention to the manner by which democracies are terminated.’ Specifically for Maeda, we need to pay closer attention to two distinct types of democratic breakdowns: endogenous termination and exogenous termination

Exogenous termination: when democracy and its popularly elected government are overthrown by forces external to the democracy and government. Spain suffered a coup d'état in February 23rd, 1981.

Endogenous termination:‘where democratically elected leaders ended the democratic process themselves’,endogenous terminations occur most frequently as the result of acts ‘suspending the constitution, arresting the opposition politicians, restricting the activities of the mass media, or rigging electoral results’. Against the conventional assumption that democracies do not self-immolate, there has been little or at least a great deal less attention paid to breakdowns of democracies whose source stems from democratic practices and institutions themselves. But as Maeda is quick to identify, this assumption has been problematic given the empirical data, which suggests that some 40 per cent of all democratic breakdowns which occurred between 1950 and 2004 were due to  endogenous factors. Democracies fail, and they do so not because of some extrinsic or exogenous factor. Indeed, almost half of all democracies that have collapsed during the last half century have done so as a result of endogenous causes: that is, democratic  reasons and processes. In other words, there is something intrinsic to democracy that makes it prone to self-destruct.

When incapable of redressing the political crises they have manufactured  themselves,whether because of individual freedoms, bureaucratic morass or the sluggishness of democratic politics, the claim is that democracies can die by their own hand. They have, in Keane’s words, ‘suffered and died under several bad moons’, another of which he claims ‘is now rising over all democracy’ In contrast to its more common meaning – the murder of a person or people by their government – the theory of democide put forward in this book focuses instead on a people who elect, by more or less democratic means, to murder their democracy.

This is precisely what will begin tomorrow. The indictment of our former president and 4 ministers confirms the process of democide of Spain.

SOS Santé

ARTE documentary, in french

Understanding group decision making failure and success

Wiser: Getting Beyond Groupthink to Make Groups Smarter

Groupthink was a term coined by Irving James that explains how groups may tend toward uniformity and censorship. This is not an easy hypothesis to demonstrate. Conditions and environment may affect, randomised trials difficult to apply. But Hastie and Sunstein tried to answer two questions in a book:

• Do groups usually correct individual mistakes? Our simple answer is that they do not. Far too often, groups actually amplify those mistake
• But do groups actually succeed in surpassing the quality of the few best? Do they, in fact, combine information and enlarge the range of arguments? Do firms accomplish this feat? Do government officials? Unfortunately, the history of the human species suggests that all too often, groups fail to live up to their potential. On the contrary, many groups turn out to be foolish

The book has basically two chapters, how groups succeeds and how groups fail. Sounds interesting to know the details. I am unable to describe the whole details in a post.
there are sound messages for the role of leaders, and specailly a conclusion:

The failures of groups often have disastrous consequences—not just for group members, but for all those who are affected by those failures. The good news is that decades of empirical work, alongside recent innovations, offer a toolbox of practical safeguards, correctives, and enhancements. With a few identifiable steps, groups can get a lot wiser.

The toolbox refers to behavioral science (Kahneman and Tversky).Unfortunately, my impression is that too few people has read this book up to now.

Stimulating ideas for drug development and pricing

New Health Technologies. Managing Access, Value and Sustainability

This new OECD report sheds light over several issues in an heterogeneous way, but the pharma chapter has a box that I want to highlight. It is really suggestive:

Future scenarios about drug development and drug pricing

These disruptive scenarios result from an expert consultation led by ShiftN and commissioned by the Belgian Health Care Knowledge Centre of Expertise and the Dutch Health Care Institute. The aim of the consultation was to imagine disruptive ways to finance R&D that could potentially better respond to public health needs.

Scenario 1: Needs-oriented Public-Private Partnerships
Public actors and drug developers are tackling public health priorities in vigorous and pragmatic partnerships. The public actor identifies indications representing high public health needs; specifies criteria for the performance levels of drugs to be developed for those indications; and indicates his willingness to pay. Through procurements with enforceable contractual commitments, the public actor enters into a partnership with drug developers to
find solutions for these needs. Developers are prepared to enter into the partnership and to give price concessions for a pre-negotiated fixed agreement on price and volume, and speedier access to market, which reduces their development risk. This drug development and pricing model is close to existing governmental procurement practices in researchintensive areas such as public transport, defence and space exploration.

Scenario 2: Parallel Drug Development Track
EU member states set up a parallel, not-for-profit drug development track that exists alongside, but independent of, the pharmaceutical and biotechnological industry. The aim of the parallel track is to develop cheaper drugs without compromising safety and effectiveness. After having made up an inventory of the public health gaps and priorities in health care, EU member state authorities ask leading public research institutes which
discoveries, assets, tools and capabilities they possess to develop solutions addressing (some of) the needs that were identified. Starting from the match between demand and available expertise, coalitions are built between these (not-for-profit) research institutes, payers, authorities and patients’ organisations. All these partners make the commitment to participate in an open and transparent way in clinical research projects. Intellectual
property (IP) rights are acquired early on in the development process by the partners of the consortium, and ownership is shared. Alternatively, the parallel research infrastructure can completely deprioritise ownership; i.e. inventions and developments in the parallel track are not protected and are in the public domain.

Scenario 3: Pay for Patents
A consortium of European countries join forces and establish a “Public Fund for Affordable Drugs”. Each of the participating countries deposits a fixed annual percentage of what it currently spends on drugs into the Fund. Private payers (including insurance companies) can also join the Fund. The Fund continuously screens the research market for “interesting” drugs that are being developed in Phase II or in Phase III for indications with clear health priorities. The Fund buys the patent from developers, conducts or commissions the last phases of research in public research institutes or subcontracts to private partners (with strict public oversight), and guides the submission process for market authorisation. Because the drug is then put on the market at a relatively low price, substantial savings are generated for the public payer. Once the system is functioning “at cruising speed”, these
savings can (partly) serve to replenish the Fund. The “Pay for Patents” model delinks R&D from manufacturing and sales. The prices decrease because the partners in the Fund consider medicines as public goods that should not be financed through monopoly prices.
Hence, once the patent is owned by the public sector, after a successful development and authorisation trajectory, the rights to produce, distribute and sell the drug can be licenced to manufacturers and distributors that provide the best deal in terms of quality, safety and accessibility for the lowest cost. As a rule, various private partners compete with each other, with the result that “new drugs enter the market at generic prices”.

Scenario 4: Public Good from A to Z
Drug development is essentially a public enterprise, and is radically re-oriented from serving private profits towards serving the public interest and patients’ needs. In a drug development system that is essentially a public enterprise, private drug companies still have a role, albeit with a completely different business model. They mainly manufacture drugs and deliver services to the public provider on a competitive basis. With drugs and other health technologies essentially public goods, patents and monopolistic prices have no role.
Patients and public health providers, not corporations, choose which unmet needs research should address. Public authorities regularly publish lists of research priorities, based on objectively established and patient-informed unmet medical needs. Governments organise and fund that research through a variety of mechanisms, including requests for proposals based on well-defined targets that any research team, public or private, can compete for, or milestone compensation, and active management of the innovation process. By paying directly for R&D and active management of the drug development pipeline, nations and health care systems pay much less than the patent-protected prices of the past. Ultimately, drug prices are set on the basis of the real costs of manufacturing, quality control and distribution, which are decoupled from R&D.
Source: Vandenbroeck, Ph. et al. (2016), “Future Scenarios About Drug Development and Drug Pricing”, Health Care Knowledge Centre (KCE) Report 271, D/2016/10.273/59, Health Services Research (HSR), Brussels.

The size of waste in health expenditure and what to do about it

Tackling Wasteful Spending on Health

OECD is preparing the annual meeting for next Tuesday, and this week has released a report on what to do with waste in health expenditures. Recognising that we have a problem is the first step to define a solution. The report shows the reasons, the categories of waste and the policy and management approaches. The agenda for health policy makers is getting larger. Highly recommended reading for this weekend.

Four main reasons can explain why individual actors might contribute to wasting resources:
● First, they do not know better: cognitive biases, knowledge deficits, risk aversion and habits lead to suboptimal decisions and errors and deviations from best practice.
● Second, they cannot do better: the system is poorly organised and managed and co-ordination is weak. In these first two situations, for the most part, actors do not intend to generate waste and are doing their best but the outcome is suboptimal
● Third, actors could stand to lose by doing the right thing; this occurs when economic incentives are misaligned with system goals – for instance, when clinicians are paid for providing services irrespective of whether the services add value.
● Fourth, all categories of actors might generate waste intentionally, with the sole purpose to serve their self-interest. This last driver is in fact a variation on the third (poor incentives) but it more  explicitly points to fraud and corruption.

Three categories of waste:
● Wasteful clinical care covers instances when patients do not receive the right care. This includes preventable clinical adverse events, driven by errors, suboptimal decisions and organisational factors, notably poor co-ordination across providers. In addition, wasteful clinical care includes ineffective and inappropriate care – sometimes known as low-value care, mostly driven by suboptimal decisions and poor incentives. Last, wasteful clinical care includes the unnecessary duplication of services.
● Operational waste occurs when care could be produced using fewer resources within the system while maintaining the benefits. Examples include situations where lower prices could be obtained for the inputs purchased, where costly inputs are used instead of less expensive ones with no benefit to the patient, or where inputs are discarded without being used. This type of waste mostly involves managers and reflects poor organisation and co-ordination.
● Governance-related waste pertains to use of resources that do not directly contribute to patient care, either because they are meant to support the administration and management of the health care system and its various components, or because they are diverted from their intended purpose through fraud, abuse and corruption

Four categories of policy levers are relevant:
● Economic and financial incentives that seek to influence the behaviour of patients,
clinicians or managers; these are most relevant when poor incentives are the root cause
of the wasteful behaviour.
● Behaviour change policies and information support – including education, persuasion
and training – to address barriers to optimal decisions.
● Organisational changes, which include policies that modify the location, role, number,
co-ordination and tools available to accomplish specific tasks of various stakeholders.
● Regulations to mandate changes in behaviour, organisation or information.

In my opinion this report has extremely useful hints for policy makers, and should be in their toolkit. 

 Hergé-Tintin Exhibition au Grand Palais jusqu'a dimanche

A review of 30 years of UK Health Policy

The Politics of Health Policy Reform in the UK: England’s Permanent Revolution

Three decades of health policy in UK explained in one book. This is what you'll find in the latest contribution of Calum Paton. It is a must read for any health policy maker, specially for those that considered UK NHS as a benchmark. There are hard statements to be considered. I have selected the following ones:

This book has been concerned with explaining politically why irrelevant solutions have been ‘the story’ in England, as regards health policy. So, at one level, the response could be, ‘So what? Yes, a lot of money has been wasted; now, let’s move on.’ This of course is the politician’s response.

Health policy in England over the last 25 years has been dominated by ideologically rooted policy salesmen, based either in think-tanks funded by private interests or operating as part of ‘sofa government’ in health policy (Paton 2012 ) and this has blurred the distinction between the public interest and private interests. There has been no countervailing advocacy of equal weight in defence of the public interest (defined here as an attempt to derive the interest of the whole community or nation rather than private beneficiaries).

The ‘rational’ interpretation of policy-making suggests to the present author, as described above, that policies are developed as means to an end, and that this ‘end’ consists in the solution to a problem which is generally accepted to be salient in the sense that a solution is necessary

Lens 1 Rationality
Lens 2 Pluralist Rationality
Lens 3 Power Elite; Structural Interests; Ruling Class
Lens 4 Garbage Can
Lens 5 Ideology; ‘radical’ power; ‘discourse’
Unifying lens: explaining 25 years

The political result of persistent English NHS upheaval is to weaken the legitimacy of the English NHS. The public, by a slow osmotic drip, comes to think that there must be something intrinsically wrong if the NHS is always being reformed, and if politicians, their advisers, and the media are persistently hand-wringing about it. As argued above, once an ill-thoughtout reform is set in motion and not ‘nipped in the bud’, it takes on a logic of its own. Reform begets reform—in part to repair mistaken initiatives from the previous round, and in part to make new initiatives, in the belief
common to both ‘managerialism’ and ‘market ideology’ that there is a better alternative out there.
This is not an argument against any reform at any time: it is an argument for more rationality in reform. Yet, it may plausibly be argued, I have presented a compelling case as to why such rationality has been absent from the trajectory of English health policy reform.

Taking politics out of the NHS would be to take politics out of politics. The answer is unspectacular and by no means a ‘silver bullet’ to solve the problem: the answer lies in a cultural change in terms of how politics, and in particular so-called public service reform, is viewed and practised.

The idea of taking politics out of the NHS has been shown to be a vain pursuit: every committee of the great and the good, and every report by an external ‘worthy’, proposing such comes to nought.

What is required to establish a health reform, or ‘anti-reform’, along the lines proposed above is something very different. It requires a consensus that health policy and the NHS do not benefit from market initiatives and ‘public service reform’ as a code for the market, whatever may be the case in the wider economy. In other words, one can be a believer in free markets and free trade, yet draw a line when it comes to health and some other public services, such as railways, which are either ‘natural monopolies’ or have other special characteristics.

I think that this kind of analysis is really welcome in a society that focuses on immediate issues and it is uncapable to understand the whole process that takes to long time to be built. For me, Calum Paton (for UK) and John McDonough (for USA) are my key references to understand health policy. Unfortunately, close health policy makers are far from using them.

PS. On the health reform industry:

The challenge for health policy analysis—which actually should mean the analysis of healthcare politics, an inconvenient truth which is itself often ignored—is often more to demolish fashionable, faddish, and foolish ‘new orthodoxy’ (if one can accept the oxymoron) than to propose some new policy ‘solution’. The problem is that ‘solutions’ are sexier, and also form the basis for an industry which sustains not only management consultants and private profiteers but also academics, think-tankers, and political advisers who combine punditry with policy proposals, to the delight of politicians
who are seeking their very own monument in the form of a ‘reform’.

The reform industry, including health policy academics, has in some cases spent more than 25 years proposing and advising on reforms which ‘dis-integrate’ the NHS only to come late to the table of integration.