Election policies ‘fail to tackle health gap’

15 Apr 10
The squeeze on public spending means health inequalities between the rich and poor are unlikely to be bridged for another decade, a leading think-tank has warned.
By Lucy Phillips

15 April 2010

The squeeze on public spending means health inequalities between the rich and poor are unlikely to be bridged for another decade, a leading think-tank has warned. 
 
All main parties pledged to protect health spending and reform patient services in this week’s election manifestos.
 
However, Chris Ham, the new chief executive of the King’s Fund, told Public Finance: ‘It’s going to be very hard, with less resources for public spending, to see how any government will really be able to make progress in reducing inequalities in health in the next Parliament.’

He added that ‘we will begin to see progress in 10 to 15 years’  if the next government succeeded in ‘getting public spending back on to a stable footing’.

Spending constraints in non-NHS areas such as education, job creation and tackling unemployment would have a big impact on differences in health outcomes between the richest and poorest, he said.

Ham’s comments followed a King’s Fund report, published on April 11, which found that health inequalities between those on high and low incomes had widened despite years of increased investment.

The Conservatives have committed to introduce a ‘health premium’, which would weight public funding towards the poorest areas with the worst health outcomes.

But Ham said existing funding formulas target deprived neighbourhoods and the Tories will need to explain how their policies would be more successful, ‘especially in this financial climate’.

Their manifesto also pledged to increase health service spending every year, allow NHS staff to set up employee-owned enterprises to run services and establish a voluntary insurance scheme to fund social care for elderly people.

Labour’s manifesto reiterated its pledge to protect spending on the NHS for the next two years. It also contained new legal rights for patients, more access to care at home and a move to make all hospitals foundation trusts by 2015.

Ham said Labour had ‘identified the right issues’. However, areas such as preventative services and long- term health conditions needed to be tackled with ‘much more vigour than so far’.

The toughest, and most detailed, NHS spending measures came in the Liberal Democrats’ manifesto. They plan to protect only frontline services, including cancer treatment and maternity provision.
Proposals to reduce waste include halving the size of the Department of Health, abolishing some health quangos, such as Connecting for Health, scrapping strategic health authorities and limiting the pay and bonuses of senior NHS managers.

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