All articles by Michael White – Page 12
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Michael White: with friends like Lansley's, who needs an opposition?
More and more people have started to ask me: “Is David Cameron going to sack Andrew Lansley?”
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Michael White: 'Nicholson's challenge' matters more than Osborne's Budget
At the TUC’s big anti-cuts rally in Hyde Park a young NHS physiotherapist spoke with a passion and sincerity which characterised the day’s main event, if not the hooligan fringe rioting in nearby Piccadilly.
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Michael White: under fire Tories retreating forwards
In my inbox on Monday I found an email from some self-styled “Big Society NHS” doctors reporting what they heard Andrew Lansley saying at a dinner given for the health secretary in his childhood neighbourhood of Hornchurch, Essex.
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Michael White: Lansley battles to keep reforms afloat
Colonel Gaddafi may have benefited from the rival distraction of Japan’s apocalyptic tsunami, but Andrew Lansley has no such luck. As HSJ’s editorial asks if he is “screaming inside”, wave after political wave rolls over him.
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Michael White: disquiet over accountability grows in the health war
The most startling political utterance I heard during another lively week in the health war fell not from the lips of Andrew Lansley, nor even from militant (“Back to the 1930s”) medics, but from mild mannered Stephen Dorrell.
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Michael White: Lansley's cloudy vision blurs the clear NHS reality
Watching the drama of health reform debate week after week, I sometimes think of a clever young Tory think tanker called Danny Kruger. Remember him?In 2005 Danny was forced to stand down as his party’s candidate to fight Tony Blair in Sedgefield because he had been heard promising “a period ...
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Michael White: 'Price competition has never been the policy... Yeah, right.'
To be frank with you, I’d never heard of David Bennett before he was unexpectedly promoted to become the new chair of Monitor, as it evolves into the economic regulator to the entire NHS. Truly this is a real-life version of Eric Carle’s children’s story The Very Hungry Caterpillar. Guess ...
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Michael White: away from NHS reforms, healthcare problems - and solutions - still sound familiar
Let’s try even harder to cheer ourselves up this week by averting our gaze from NHS reforms and looking at a near neighbour with more pressing healthcare dilemmas. Not to mention deeper budget gloom. No prizes for guessing I was in Dublin recently.
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Michael White: somwhere to escape the cuts
Wherever you turn at present it’s hard to escape the government’s cuts programme. I confirmed that (again) when I rang my sister at the nursery-infant-and-parenting unit she has worked in for many years. Their budget has been slashed, redundancies loom. Should she volunteer to go, taking decades of experience with ...
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Michael White: opposition's political artillery fire rings hollow
A barrage of political artillery fire preceded Monday’s Commons second reading of the Health and Social Care Bill.
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Michael White: like a civil war, the Health Bill has divided political families
Reading in last week’s HSJ how Andrew Lansley’s Health Bill will combine NHS decentralisation with powerful regulation from Whitehall, I was reminded of the label once attached to the Chinese communist party’s controlled introduction of capitalism: “market Stalinism”.
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Michael White: ministers are puzzled by the BMA’s hostility
It remains a guiding principle of this column that any policy opposed by the British Medical Association can’t be all bad.
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‘Dentists are making their own high pitched whine about the Care Quality Commission’
I saw Michael Gove declaring himself “an enthusiast” for Andrew Lansley’s healthcare reforms, which says more for the education secretary’s collegiate loyalty than his attention to the small print.
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Michael White: It could have been worse
The danger for ministers over the festive break is to be drawn into the news vacuum that develops when the world goes on holiday. How well did Andrew Lansley survive his first Yuletide vacuum in the health hot seat?
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'People are skeptical of welfare spending'
As coalition ministers plough on with radical reforms of health and other public services, they should not take much comfort from this week’s social attitude survey suggesting Britain is now more right wing than in the Thatcherite 80s.
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Michael White: caution and openness
Watching Andrew Lansley introduce MPs to his “nudge” white paper on public health, I was struck by how much it is still a first draft and by how enthusiastic the new generation of Conservative MPs is for bossiness.
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'Stalinist Whitehall controls will be needed'
I felt a bit sorry for Phil Morley, chief executive of the Hull and East Yorkshire Hospitals Trust, getting roughed up on the radio after Dr Foster’s sleuths named his patch as the place where patients are most likely to die of complications after routine operations.
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'Dorrell argues now for quiet pragmatism, for letting change evolve'
Am I just imagining it? Or did Andrew Lansley start to modify his combative message to the NHS, its suspicious staff and customers, even before Stephen Dorrell’s striking intervention in the reform debate courtesy of last week’s HSJ?
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'NHS cuts will come off a far fatter bird'
It won’t have changed your life much, but MPs have been squabbling for weeks now over the future size of the NHS budget under the coalition’s plans for the next five years. “Bigger or smaller?” critics demand to know. Yes or no, does it change anything?
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Michael White: health panel discussions
As I type I can hear this week’s opening of the Mid Staffordshire Foundation Trust public inquiry being discussed on the radio.