Opinion  

However, 60 years on, there are seven million people with private medical insurance; six million people with private health cash plans; and eight million people who pay privately for complementary therapies. More than 250,000 pay for acute surgery each year and millions more pay privately towards long-term care.

This is not to mention the collapse of NHS dentistry or moves by ministers to grant seriously ill patients the freedom to top-up NHS care with private innovative medicines and treatments.

Nurses For Reform (NFR) believes it is time health professionals recognised the failure of the NHS. Considering the long waiting lists, filthy wards and consumer dissatisfaction, we believe all hospitals should be in the independent sector.

Consumers should be empowered with information through advertising and be able to access trusted brands and all hospitals, doctors and pharmaceutical companies should be free to advertise.

It is only when healthcare is opened up to real consumers, trusted brands and funding arrangements that health professionals will find themselves working with the incentives, resources and freedom to deliver high-quality care.

The US does not represent a free market healthcare system. It has a highly planned, regulated and government-funded system that takes - through state programmes such as Medicaid and Medicare - a historically greater proportion of gross domestic product than the NHS.

As long as healthcare remains under state control, power-seeking politicians will put political interests over those of patients.

Sixty years after the foundation of the NHS, we reject egalitarianism and nationalisation in favour of privatisation and competition. We don't believe in the NHS but in consumer-led markets detached from politics.

- Dr Helen Evans, director of Nurses for Reform and author of 'Sixty Years On: Who Cares for the NHS?' published by the Institute of Economic Affairs.