We’re guessing, but it’s very bad - send more money!

Clearly, we’ve got to take all the money off the rich folk and give it to the poorer. How could we not - we must, after all, save the NHS:

Britain’s ‘medieval’ health inequality is devastating NHS, experts say

Exclusive: Health service estimated to be spending £50bn a year on effects of deprivation and child poverty

Well, there we have it. 100% wealth tax now!

Except, well, the evidence is less than rigorously supportable:

Britain’s “medieval” levels of health inequality are having a “devastating” effect on the NHS, experts have warned, with the health service estimated to be spending as much as £50bn a year on the effects of deprivation.

Rising rates of child poverty have led to a growing burden on hospitals, with the knock-on cost to the NHS comparable to the annual defence budget.

One senior NHS figure said they were seeing “medieval” levels of untreated illness in some of Britain’s poorest communities, including people attending A&E “with cancerous lumps bursting through their skin”.

We’re wholly unaware of any reason to believe such cancers are caused by poverty. And, given health care is free at the point of consumption, that can’t be it either.

But it’s the level of proof being used here:

A comprehensive report published by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF) in 2016 estimated that £29bn of NHS spending was associated with poverty.

One of the report’s authors, Prof Donald Hirsch of Loughborough University said that although the exact cost today cannot be known without repeating the study, it was likely to be much higher.

“We spend a lot more on the NHS now than in 2014, and if the fraction attributable to poverty were the same, the cost would have risen to nearly £50bn,” he said.

That’s rather less than a fundamental analysis, isn’t it - more pulled from a……but we’re a family publication here.

Still, this is how politics is done, aren’t we all the lucky ones?

Tim Worstall