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Economics
17 June 2025
Press Release
3 July 2025
Healthcare
Editorial Director Kristian Niemietz was quoted in the Times on NHS failures.
The article said:
“The NHS is one of the worst health systems in the western world at converting money into better care, a report by the TaxPayers’ Alliance suggests.
“Researchers examined data from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development to compare 13 health systems, including in the UK, Canada, Australia, France and Germany, and found the UK had the lowest life expectancy and highest rates of avoidable deaths.
“It showed that the NHS struggled to convert funding into more resources such as doctors, nurses, hospital beds or scanners, with two thirds of its budget swallowed up by staffing costs, including pensions.
“Kristian Niemietz, head of political economy at the Institute of Economic Affairs, said: “In state-run health systems like the British NHS, there is often a temptation to prioritise day-to-day spending over long-term investment. Politicians know that by the time the detrimental effects become apparent, somebody else will be in charge and it will be somebody else’s problem.
“The paper also shows that while the NHS cannot be described as ‘underfunded’, it is in a very real sense under-resourced. These are not the same thing — a pile of cash does not magically transform itself into a doctor, a nurse or an MRI scanner. The NHS is remarkably bad at converting its financial resources into medical inputs.”
Read the full article here.
The article said:
“The NHS is one of the worst health systems in the western world at converting money into better care, a report by the TaxPayers’ Alliance suggests.
“Researchers examined data from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development to compare 13 health systems, including in the UK, Canada, Australia, France and Germany, and found the UK had the lowest life expectancy and highest rates of avoidable deaths.
“It showed that the NHS struggled to convert funding into more resources such as doctors, nurses, hospital beds or scanners, with two thirds of its budget swallowed up by staffing costs, including pensions.
“Kristian Niemietz, head of political economy at the Institute of Economic Affairs, said: “In state-run health systems like the British NHS, there is often a temptation to prioritise day-to-day spending over long-term investment. Politicians know that by the time the detrimental effects become apparent, somebody else will be in charge and it will be somebody else’s problem.
“The paper also shows that while the NHS cannot be described as ‘underfunded’, it is in a very real sense under-resourced. These are not the same thing — a pile of cash does not magically transform itself into a doctor, a nurse or an MRI scanner. The NHS is remarkably bad at converting its financial resources into medical inputs.”
Read the full article here.
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