What to do about the NHS? I’ve just been on a Newsnight which took as its premise that the model is broken and needs to be fixed. “Uncaring. Cruel. Inadequate. Lax,” said Kirsty Wark, opening the show. “Why is the NHS now failing so many patients?” The Keogh report is published tomorrow and is expected to be devastating – but not detailed enough: it’ll refer to 13,000 ‘excess’ deaths across 14 hospital trusts but it will not explain why these people died. Or even who they were: those who suspect they lost a relative due to NHS blunder will be none the wiser.
Towards the end of the show, Newsnight ran a graph from 
the Nuffield Trust (right) suggesting that, if demographic pressures remain what they are, the NHS will need £54 billion while the parsimonious government is keeping funding flat. The graph looked deeply suspect to me. I suspect it took, as its premise, that the NHS could not be possible more efficient or productive.
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