Do you know of any areas of wasteful health spending?

First topic message reminder :

The NHS is being changed, no matter what the public say...

The given main reason is to improve services but cost effectiveness is always included.

We are told that increased compatition will help this but can you think of other areas where there is waste which could be cut at a stroke without the loss of jobs?

One of our members posted on another board that the USA is the largest economy in the world, but that “it cannot even afford to treat its poor”. He correctly indicated that the USA spends 17% of its GDP on healthcare, “well ahead of the world average and twice that of the UK”. This chart shows how spending on health, country by country, is broken down between private and public provision:-

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For decades, the Tories have peddled the lie (to justify their selling off of state assets to their donors and cronies) that private provision is always more efficient than public. You don’t have to look far to know that isn’t true. Look at the security shambles over the 2012 Olympics; state provision (namely the armed forces) had to save the day after G4S couldn’t cope. Then look at the railways, with the mess that Southern Rail is in, and how some commuters are losing their jobs because they can’t get to work. The East Coast line was taken back into public ownership after twice being abandoned by the private sector. In public hands it returned a billion pounds to the taxpayer, but that wasn’t convenient for the Tory ideologues and so it’s been privatised again. The joke is that some of our railways are owned by foreign states, but the Tories don’t seem to mind that. It would cost nothing to renationalise all the railways. All that has to be done is that they are taken back into public ownership as each franchise expires.

There is no better example of the inefficiency of the private sector than in healthcare. A glance at the above chart will show how the USA spends more than twice as much on private healthcare than any other country listed. Private medicine is primarily about making vast profits rather than satisfying patient need. And with it goes an army of bureaucrats, itemising every last item used in treatments, then billing the patients and/or their insurance companies. There’s your area of wasteful spending! Of course the USA could treat its poor if it adopted an efficient, free-at-the-point of use system similar to our much-maligned NHS, but the political will has to be there.

....the USA spends more than twice as much on private healthcare than any other country listed.

A contributory factor is the enormous premium charged by Insurance Companies for professional indemnity - without which no professional could practice.

Government pledges £5billion to NHS over next five years "to build more corridors".