Promoting GP competition

Reform Scotland has published a pamphlet arguing that since GP practices are insufficiently sensitive to patients’ needs, the answer must be to promote competition between providers. That doesn’t follow. When markets are based on ‘choice’, the choices that are made are not just the choices of consumers; they are also the choices of providers. Competition works because providers refine and select what they do. They choose who their customers are. They choose their location. Making the right choices cut costs; that is why competitive markets tend to be efficient (and why public services aims for ‘cost-effectiveness’ instead of efficiency – the aims are very different). The selective decisions of providers, within the current system, are precisely the reasons why patients do not get what they need. Which practices are going to cover people in isolated rural locations? Who is going to provide services to drug users, who use GP services at ten times the rate of other people? Who is going to provide services to very elderly people, who cost practices seven times the resource of other patients? Competition is not the way to a universal service; it is the opposite of what is called for.

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