Protection and insurance

Tweet There is a mantra oft-repeated by politicians keen to spend more and more of our money on acquiring and using weapons that “the first duty of any government is to protect its citizens”.  It’s duly parroted by the media, solemnly pronouncing on whether party A or party B is actually behaving in a way consistent with the mantra.  It’s treated as unarguable truth, largely because it’s ‘obviously true’.

But one of the things that life has taught me is that truth isn’t always obvious; and that which is ‘obvious’ isn’t always true.  In this case, I’m not at all sure that the statement means anything, shorn of context and without defining what ‘protect’ means as well as ‘protection from what’.

The latest outing that I saw for the statement was in the Sunday Times, when former Labour leadership candidate Liz Kendall trotted it out in support of the proposition that it is Labour’s ‘patriotic duty’ to back Trident.  In this context, it is, in effect, a substitute for argument and debate; a sort of trump card which over-rules any objection.  That isn’t helpful to rational consideration.

I don’t disagree with the statement as such; I think that governments should seek to protect their citizens from those things which threaten them.  But I don’t see nuclear blackmail as one of the biggest threats facing me or most other citizens.  Nor, in reality, do I see terrorism – a blanket word which in itself needs a lot more definition and refinement – as being the biggest threat to citizens of the UK.

For most of the population (although I’d accept that this isn’t true for those who move in the same circles as most of our politicians) their economic situation, and concerns about health care and education are much bigger threats to their lifestyles and well being.  And it’s hard to see how diverting money away from those fields to pay for a new nuclear weapons system does anything other than increase those threats.  In essence, even if the politicians really do believe that the mantra is one by which they should govern, their actions seem destined to achieve the opposite.

Another argument which is regularly advanced for Trident is that it’s some sort of ‘insurance policy’, and that wise people don’t go around without insurance.  But that’s simply not true.  Insurance policies don’t prevent things happening; they can’t.  Insurance is about pooling risk so that those who lose are, in effect, compensated for their loss by those who don’t.  The ‘protection’ offered by Trident is more akin to that traditionally offered by the mafia than a conventional insurance policy.  Insurance is about compensation for damage, not striking back - there’s nothing in my life insurance policy about posthumous retaliation.  The comparison with insurance is nonsensical.

Trident isn’t about protection; it isn’t about insurance; and it has little to do with the threats currently facing most of the UK population.  What it is about is keeping the UK government in the big boys club, pretending that the UK is still some sort of global power, and closing our eyes to the realities of the twenty first century.  It’s no way to build a safer world.

Multi-tiered health

Tweet I'm not convinced that it's entirely fair to use Dan Hannan's words as evidence of some sort of secret agenda by Cameron to destroy the NHS, although some seem to have been trying to make that leap. I do believe that it is entirely fair to point out, however, that Hannan is far from being alone in his views, and that there are a number of people in the Tory Party who really do want to dismantle the NHS. And I suspect that their views are rather more widespread in that party than the official line would suggest.

What remains unclear is how much influence that line of thinking has within the party – and to what extent that would be strengthened by an influx of new Tory MPs if they win a number of additional seats at the next election. Will Cameron be able to make his own views on the NHS stick?

More worryingly, Hannan's outburst has led to a number of people who ought to be natural defenders of the NHS to start considering the idea of replacing a tax-funded service with an NHS funded through compulsory health insurance. I think they are wrong, for a number of reasons.

In the first place, a service funded by insurance payments would be a fundamentally different kind of service. It is a complete shift away from a service 'free at the point of use', since it would mean that each and every use of the service was accompanied by an invoice. The invoices would be sent direct to the insurance companies rather than paid by the individuals, which means that it might not look that different from the point of view of the patient, but it would represent a completely different approach to running and administering the service. It doesn't necessarily mean a full-scale privatisation of the NHS, but that would be the likeliest outcome for an organisation delivering services for which it then charges.

Secondly, funding the service through insurance premiums would not, of itself, bring one extra penny into the funding of the service. The only way of increasing the funding by such a move is if the total payments made in insurance premiums exceed the amount paid from general taxation revenue at present. And of course, they'd need to exceed that sum by at least the amount of profit to be creamed off by the insurance companies, just to stand still.

What it would do, of course, is to change the basis of payment from a tax system which has an element of progressiveness about it (the amount paid depends at least in part on ability to pay) to a system which takes no account of ability to pay, except in the minority of cases where a basic safety net provision is put in place.

The third reason is that, even with a state-guaranteed minimum level of provision for the most needy, different people would have different levels of cover bought from different insurance companies. We would have at least a two-tier – and probably a multi-tiered – system of provision of health care, based not on health need, but on the level of premium paid.

In effect, the most well-off would pay less for a better standard of health care than they get currently; whilst the less well off would pay more for a lower standard. The Hannans of the Tory party know this – and also know who their target audience is.