Skip to main content

Commissioning and the NHS

In all the discussions about the NHS it does appear that one thing is clear. We need to avoid the NHS being subject to EU Competition Law. This is the argument I have been putting. The danger is that commissioners are forced to accept tenders that they don't want to accept because of external pressure. It is that key distinction that changes the system from as it has been described as an internal market to an external market.

I do think progress is being made on this issue. However, cast iron certainty is needed for the bill to progress (which in part is why it is currently parked in a siding).

Comments

paulleake said…
The repeated response from ministers is that competition law (EU or otherwise) is not being extended to health, which seems a red herring.

Is there any clarity at all on whether changes to the way health is commissioned would move it within the scope of competition law _as it now stands_?

Popular posts from this blog

Why are babies born young?

Why are babies born young? This sounds like an odd question. People would say "of course babies are born young". However, this goes to the core of the question of human (or animal) development. Why is it that as time passes people develop initially through puberty and then for women through menopause and more generally getting diseases such as sarcopenia, osteoporosis, diabetes and cancer, but most of the time babies start showing no signs of this. Lots of research into this has happened over the years and now I think it is clear why this is. It raises some interesting questions. Biological youth is about how well a cell functions. Cells that are old in a biological sense don't work that well. One of the ways in which cells stop working is they fail to produce the full range of proteins. Generally the proteins that are produced from longer genes stop being produced. The reason for this relates to how the Genes work (the Genome). Because the genome is not gettin