NHS users should pay £10 a month says former health minister

[dutchman]

Lord Warner says monthly fee could be collected alongside council tax to prevent health service from sliding into decline

Everyone in the UK should start paying a £10-a-month NHS "membership charge" to save it from sliding into a decline that threatens its existence, a former Labour health minister has urged.

Lord Warner, who served under Tony Blair, warns that the NHS will become unsustainable without new sources of funding and painful changes.

"Many politicians and clinicians are scared to tell people that our much-beloved 65-year-old NHS no longer meets the country's needs," Warner writes in the Guardian.

"Frankly, it is often poor value for money. The NHS now represents the greatest public spending challenge after the general election. MPs taking to the streets to preserve clinically unsustainable hospital services only damage their constituents."

Warner, in a report he has co-authored for the thinktank Reform, says dramatic action is needed as the NHS faces an expected £30bn-a-year gap by 2020 between the demand for healthcare and its ability to respond, and needs several new funding streams to remain viable.

Revenue could also come from higher, hypothecated "sin" taxes on alcohol, tobacco and gambling, and taxes on sugary foods because of rising obesity.

Inheritance tax needs to be collected from more than the current 3.5% of the 500,000 people who die each year, and visitors staying overnight in hospital should pay "hotel charges".

A £10 monthly fee would be used to fund local initiatives to improve prevention of ill-health and an annual "health MoT" for everyone of working age, say Warner and co-author Jack O'Sullivan, an expert in new thinking in health and social care.

• Lord Warner is a Labour peer who served as a health minister from 2003 to 2006

[rebbonk]

Anyone care to tell this muppet that we've already paid through the nose via NI? He and others in government that have mismanaged our funds ought be hanged. Yet again these imbeciles expect us to make up for their inabilities, mismanagement and general incompetence.

[dutchman]

Anyone care to tell this muppet that we've already paid through the nose via NI?

Oddly enough Rebbonk the NHS is paid for almost entirely from general taxation with only a very small amount coming from National Insurance contributions!