It goes down very well with voters, but are free NHS prescriptions such an obvious boon? I ask because this week it became clear that, within a couple of years, only patients in England will have to pay for their medicines after Northern Ireland's decision to follow Wales and Scotland and abolish prescription charges altogether I can already hear the objections of English patients, furious at the unfairness of a supposedly national health service that is in UK terms, of course, nothing of the sort. But my question is not about British health equality. It is about the most effective use of limited public funds which, ultimately perhaps, should amount to the same thing. Ask someone whether they would rather pay £7.10 or get something free and they will think it must be a trick question. But the problem with free stuff is that people don't value it. And the 'stuff' we are talking about in England alone is valued at £8.2 billion. Let's look what has happened in Wales.They went first and abolished prescription charges in April 2007. A year on, an enterprising Liberal Democrat wrote to GPs to ask what they thought. It was a straw poll rather than anything you could hang your hat on, but almost two-thirds of 133 family doctors said they opposed free prescriptions. Here are some of the responses; "I think that patients frequently fail to value that which they receive cost free and I suspect this contributes to high levels of wastage of me ...
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It goes down very well with voters, but are free NHS prescriptions such an obvious boon? I ask because this week it became clear that, within a couple of years, only patients in England will have to pay for their medicines after Northern Ireland's decision to follow Wales and Scotland and abolish prescription charges altogether I can already hear the objections of English patients, furious at the unfairness of a supposedly national health service that is in UK terms, of course, nothing of the sort. But my question is not about British health equality. It is about the most effective use of limited public funds which, ultimately perhaps, should amount to the same thing. Ask someone whether they would rather pay £7.10 or get something free and they will think it must be a trick question. But the problem with free stuff is that people don't value it. And the 'stuff' we are talking about in England alone is valued at £8.2 billion. Let's look what has happened in Wales.They went first and abolished prescription charges in April 2007. A year on, an enterprising Liberal Democrat wrote to GPs to ask what they thought. It was a straw poll rather than anything you could hang your hat on, but almost two-thirds of 133 family doctors said they opposed free prescriptions. Here are some of the responses; "I think that patients frequently fail to value that which they receive cost free and I suspect this contributes to high levels of wastage of me ...