Simple answers for complex problems

Who should run health and education, asks Madsen Pirie in The Business. His answer is to leave it to the professionals.

The education system could be entrusted to an appointed board of head teachers. They would determine priorities and how state schools could be improved. Their budget could be set at current levels, uprated annually for inflation, and their mandate might be a general one to ensure that schoolchildren can read and write, and are educated to a high standard. The board itself would allocate budgets to individual schools. This move would de-politicise education and be immensely popular.

Turning to the health service, he writes

A move to hand control of the NHS to a separate non-political body consisting of medical practitioners would enjoy similarly massive backing. New polls from YouGov show big majorities in favour of less control by politicians and managers, and more by professionals. A national board of appointed medical practitioners would allocate the NHS budget (again, uprated annually), determine the priorities, and allocate the resources to the various NHS institutions. There would still be priority decisions to be made, but they would not be made on political grounds, but by people who knew what they were doing.

It may be popular, but does it make sense?

The educational establishment has form. Notoriously the teaching profession adopted methods of teaching reading which simply didn't work. Standards of reading and arithmetic fell, leading directly to government intervention. Schools have also discouraged competitive team sports (I hated them but I was in a minority).

These head teachers would doubtless be judged by results, as is The Bank of England. But exam syllabuses are even more easily fudged than inflation rates.

Health provision is also too important to be left to the doctors - there are important social choices to be made, and that means democratically elected politicians.

Some six million people are on drugs for high blood pressure, reports The Telegraph - a tenth of the population. The National Institute for Clinical Excellence (Nice) and the British Hypertension Society "recommend treating blood pressure at levels that embrace an estimated 40 per cent of the adult population", writes Sheena Meredith. And some argue for higher levels.

"Some experts", she says, "are beginning to worry that turning a risk factor - such as high blood pressure - into a disease also has unanticipated effects".

Should our healthcare aims, as a society, just seek to prolong life, or should we also aim to enhance its quality - or at least not reduce it to the extent of turning a majority of the population into patients?

Would our overall wellbeing be improved more by, say, reducing (or abolishing) the waiting list for hip replacements, or speeding up cataract operations, or improving treatment for children with depression?

These are deep questions deserving public debate, and certainly not the province of doctors to decide.

The idea that health and education provision could be run like The Bank of England is seductive.

But it's wrong.