But if the Government’s not very good at investing in healthcare then….

…Perhaps we shouldn’t have government doing the healthcare?

The Government has cut funding for nursing courses in a move that risks undermining its pledge to end the NHS’s reliance on foreign workers.

Ministers have quietly frozen grants that are paid to universities to help them cover the higher costs of training medical workers.

Critics reacted by warning that the move, which represents a real-terms cut, would “worsen an already difficult situation” in the sector and “leave us more reliant” on imported labour.

It will also prompt fears of further cuts down the line, with education set to be one of the losers in Rachel Reeves’s spending review this week.

Universities are already struggling to keep nursing courses afloat, with research showing that many are cutting lecturer jobs to save cash.

In last year’s manifesto, Labour pledged to “end the long-term reliance on overseas workers” with a “workforce and training plan” for the NHS.

Well, yes. As we’ve noted before when government decides to really take apprenticeships in hand we gain a more expensive system which trains fewer apprentices. Here we’re seeing what happens when government decides that all nurses should be graduates - a recent, ahem, innovation. The government decides to, ahem, economise on the training of nurses so that not only are they more expensive - graduates, see? - we have fewer of them.

Which is a lead in to something we keep saying about governments. As the interest of a politician never does extend further than the next election which will decide whether they remain a politician or not governments - run by politicians in the interest of politicians as they are - are terrible at decision making that runs beyond the next election. This is why nothing government owned is ever maintained - terribly unsexy stuff that is.

As Kingsley Amis didn’t quite say: more government means worse.

But let us restrict ourselves to healthcare here. We’ve an ever rising din, cacophony, about how bad government is at running healthcare, paying and training the staff and so on. Why are so few looking at this distinct underperfomance and then wondering whether we should continue having government running healthcare? We mean, well, if it all is that terrible then why use this system?

Tim Worstall