Health and Social Care Bill

The taxpayer invests in GPs to provide medical and clinical excellence so that they can diagnose people's health problems. The taxpayer does not invest in them to become small business people who go around trying to maximise profit and work out rates of return on different sorts of health care. That is the problem with introducing privatisation and marketisation: the thought in the back of the business person's head is how to make money, not simply what is the best diagnosis. The customers whom GPs are facing—patients—are to a large extent ignorant. It is not like buying electricity from npower: patients do not know what is wrong with them. They are in the hands of their GP and they do not know whether what they have been prescribed—perhaps a cheaper drug that makes a higher profit but is not as effective—is right: they just have to guess.