10 February 2006
The UK faces a debate about how much of the public purse it wishes to spend on health care after 2008, the King's Fund said this week.
The charity said the Department of Health had acknowledged that spending was unlikely to continue rising at current levels beyond 2008.
But in Spending on health care: how much is enough? the think-tank said government policies were fuelling demand for services.
At the same time, there was evidence that the rate of improvement was declining, even as more money flowed into the NHS.
More information on the costs and benefits of major NHS reforms was needed to inform the discussion and justify further investment, the report suggested. And next year's Comprehensive Spending Review gave the government an opportunity to be explicit about how much NHS reforms would cost and what the taxpayer could expect in return.
John Appleby, one of the report's authors and the fund's chief economist, said the UK could be approaching the limits of its health spending.
'As the UK moves into the big league of health care spenders – but with unabated pressures to spend more – it will become increasingly important to consider in a rational and transparent way how much more we want to spend,' he said.
'We are nearing the end of a period of planned high growth in health care investment and we soon face inevitable decisions about how to arrive at limits to funding.
'This does not necessarily mean no future growth in spending. But it does mean that a more sophisticated case needs to be made to justify devoting society's scarce resources to health care rather than other things.'
In a separate report, the fund said pay rises will account for almost 40% of the extra £4.5bn to be spent on hospital and community health services in 2006/07.
In an update on last year's report Independent audit of the NHS under Labour, it said other costs, such as clinical negligence, would absorb a further 32% of the growth in spending, leaving £1.26bn to spend on priorities such as waiting lists.
However, this would be doubled if the NHS achieved its efficiency savings target of 2.5%.
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