On David Cameron's "historic opportunity to reform the NHS"

This morning I came to be reading this article on The Telegraph's website.

It starts off in the form of listing problems in the NHS, failing to explain the causes, generally the opening achieves it's evident goal of saying to the reader "The NHS is broken"

Eventually the article gets to it's second premise, which is that David Cameron has the public support to "fix" the NHS..

It concludes by urging the Prime Minister to "Grasp the nettle, Mr Cameron. Reform the NHS and secure your place in history. "

There's a lot wrong with this reasoning, despite the well formed syllogism.

For a start it misses the fact that the NHS, despite not being cut, remains underfunded in real terms due to a reluctance to increase spending appropriately as the cost of health has increased nominally.

Translating this from economic jargon to English, The NHS has seen it's funding drained from it slowly, the apparent protection from cuts is a half-measure meant to fool those not versed in the details.

Another problem is that much of the inefficiency that does exist within the NHS is due to top-down revisions from government. The only advantage a privately owned/run health service has over a public one is that The Tories don't have an ideological incentive to sabotage the private sector.

We need only look to The US to see what a fully private health service looks like, one in which spending on health per person has been TWICE that of our own and even then the poor go un-treated.

That is all I will say of the former premise for now I wish to discuss the latter:

"Mr Cameron, like many Tories, is instinctively wary of doing anything that could be caricatured as privatising or dismantling the NHS. He should have more confidence. This year, he roundly defeated a Labour Party whose campaign was based on such a caricature. Voters are more open to NHS reform than politicians believe. "

Roundly defeated? Oh no he didn't!

Oh indeed, The Conservatives gained the majority of seats and labour lost a 'surprise' coup in Scotland. Really though when you look at the sheer quality and competence of that political campaign, the voters' fear of an SNP coalition and the appeal of populism vs. the Westminster bubble..

All of this combined to achieve a Tory vote of ~25%  of the electorate. Many of those votes were cast in uncertainty and fear, with the hope that they would be better off, and the assurance of the Prime Minister that tax credits would be safe...

Despite the supposed un-electability of the opposition, David Cameron may well have sealed his party's fate for 2020 already, never mind what could happen if he 'reformed' the NHS!