Kudos to the BBC for nuancing the healthcare debate
Elliot Bidgood, 23 July 2013
The BBC often comes under fire for its supposed political bias. On the one hand, many on the right have always felt it has a “lefty bias”, while on the left, a bizarre conspiracy theory has recently taken hold that the BBC “betrayed” the NHS by failing to report on the Health and Social Care Act reorganisation and the expansion of competition in the NHS – as someone who follows the Beeb’s health coverage closely, I feel this is not the case. Nor has it failed to adequately cover controversies such as Mid Staffs or last week’s Keogh report, in my personal view, though if both ideological poles are dissatisfied this may perhaps speak to balance. A particularly praiseworthy example of nuanced reporting came on Thursday, when as part of BBC News Online’s new “Why not…” articles (examining “eye-catching policy ideas that are often talked about but never seem to feature in UK general election campaigns”), the BBC’s Brian Wheeler published a piece entitled “Why not… privatise the NHS?”
First, Wheeler correctly acknowledges that “privatisation” is a “slippery concept”. Does it refer to free NHS care being provided by a mix of providers, the NHS catering for private patients, a continental universal social insurance system, the imposition of co-payment or a US-style system, or all of the above? Such ambiguities are great, and yet this loaded term is sometimes thrown about without clarification in our healthcare debates, at times impeding discussion.
Wheeler then provides concise written statements from two very different personalities; Thomas Cawston of Reform, who argues for the positive effects of competition in both the UK and Europe, and Oliver Huitson of OpenDemocracy’s OurNHS project, who warns about market failure. Echoing Wheeler, Cawston calls competition a “bogey word” in UK politics, and then argues that pluralistic provision is second-nature in much of Europe and that British patients do value the empowering effects of choice in health services, points that the Civitas Health Unit has long stressed.
Huitson then argues his case, and while I disagree with some of it, it is important that all views be aired. For example, he warns that competition has created an unequal distribution of health facilities between rural and urban areas in Sweden and the Netherlands. This needs to be addressed, but I’d also point out that overall both Sweden and the Netherlands lead the UK on several international clinical outcome and patient experience measures, showing the difficulty of relying on any one measure and the constant need to look at a range of data in health comparisons. At the end of the day, nothing is more important to a functioning democracy than a well-informed electorate – keep it up, BBC.
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