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		Labour all at sea on health Lincolnshire Echo - October 2 2002 Poor old Tony Blair had a hard time at Blackpool last week over several issues. One of the toughest was union opposition to private funding in the health service. The unions ganged up on the Labour leadership and demanded an end to commercial involvement in health delivery. The rhetoric of union bosses was instructive. What really stuck in their throats was the idea of companies making a profit out of health. To listen to them, you'd think that profits were always a bad thing. But are they? Profits are a measure of success. Good companies make profits -- but companies lose money when they fail to deliver value, or satisfy customers. Profits mean jobs. Profitable companies provide secure jobs and new jobs. Losses mean lay-offs. Profits mean investment. Britain needs investment -- but no lender is keen to put money into a company that's losing money. And profits mean pensions. We hear a lot about fat-cat bosses, but most distributed profits go to unit trusts and pension funds, benefiting many millions of people. Our current problems with pensions arise, in part, because British companies are not profitable enough (in part because of Gordon Brown's 1997 tax raid on pension funds). So profits mean jobs, growth, prosperity, investment, pensions. Difficult to see why they're a dirty word to trade union bosses. Health, they say, is too important to leave to the private sector. Well food is important too. Should we have a state monopoly on the supply of food, like George Orwell's 1984, with Victory brand baked beans? Tesco is a very profitable and successful company. Is anyone arguing that Tesco make profits by skimping on service and quality? Of course not! Tesco is profitable BECAUSE it delivers excellent service and quality, so people want to shop there. We shouldn't be asking whether private companies should make profits in the health sector. We should ask whether they can deliver quality, value and service. The NHS, despite the huge efforts of dedicated and over-worked professionals, is still run on the same model as Soviet central planning. It used to be the second largest employer in Europe apart from the Red Army. But now that the Red Army has shrunk, the NHS is probably the largest. If the NHS is the best way to run a health service, how come no one else in the world has copied it? How come major European countries deliver dramatically better results? It's not just money. Scotland already spends pro-rata as much as most EU countries on health, but its health service has the same problems as in England. I think Blair is right (for once) to bring commercial companies into health delivery. The NHS commitment is care free at the point of use. That means the government pays for it. It doesn't mean that the government has to run it. There are few problems that government interference can't make worse. The real task in front of us is not just to bring in private companies on the supply side. It's to give patients choice on the demand side. Until patients can shop around for care -- and parents can shop around for schools -- we won't see the changes we want. We won't get the same quality of provision as we see on the continent. With consumer choice, the government would still pay, but the market would drive up quality and service. Labour can't see this -- and even if they could, the unions wouldn't let them do it. That's why Labour will fail to deliver on public services, despite the billions that Gordon Brown is pouring in. That's why only the Conservatives can offer parents, patients and voters the power of choice -- and the quality and service which our continental cousins take for granted.