All articles by Michael White – Page 17
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Michael White on contaminated blood
It never ceases to amaze me how society attaches different value to different lives.
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Michael White on the effects of the recession
How should we react to headlines warning NHS finance directors and their colleagues elsewhere in the public sector that a swathe of private finance initiatives - including new hospitals - is under serious threat because of the recession?
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Michael White on the NHS and vested interests
I always have mixed feelings on reading that some grand professional body like the Law Society or the British Medical Association is moved to condemn a new government policy as unwise or unclear, and sometimes downright dangerous.
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Michael White on public health nudges
I was relaxing on the South Island of New Zealand and just about to throw away what had been a very nice bottle of local sauvignon blanc when I noticed a detail on the label.
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Michael White on NHS politics
In these times of global recession and rising unemployment we should seek cheerful news. I offer these crumbs of comfort from the thinly attended fag end of the Queen's Speech debate, where health and education were bundled up as one.
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Michael White on the NHS in recession
A rough old trade is politics, as most MPs can confirm. All the same, I felt a bit sorry for Andrew Lansley the other week when he was beaten up for saying 'on many counts recession can be good for us'.
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Michael White on the public sector workforce
'Welcome to Soviet Britain,' the Daily Mail's headline roared this week. What on earth is the scourge of the NHS complaining about this time? I murmured, flinching over my first cuppa of the day.
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Michael White on the NHS budget
I don't think I heard the word 'NHS' more than once during the chancellor's emergency budget - for that is what it was - on Monday.
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Michael White on euthanasia
Buried away in a Commons debate the other day was a remark that could apply to the unhealthy state of the economy and assorted remedies to cure it, including a large injection of job-boosting cash into the NHS capital building programme.
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Michael White on NHS bad news
Some politicians suspected Alan Johnson deliberately chose to make his announcement on top-ups on the same day as Barack Obama's election to the US presidency in the hope that he could 'bury bad news.'
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Michael White on IT in the NHS
You were probably far too busy to notice Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg urging Gordon Brown the other day to 'distinguish between good public spending and bad public spending… By not wasting £13bn on an NHS computer system that doesn't work'.
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Michael White on pharmaceutical price regulation
I am indebted to Fred Curzon, 7th Earl Howe and veteran Tory health spokesman in the Lords, for a little gem of a debate in the upper house the other evening. It was doubtless neglected because of the Yachtgate affair in Corfu and relative trivia like the global financial collapse.
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Michael White on keeping patients out of hospital
It is not often you read of a new controversy in the Sunday papers and stumble on what looks like the answer in Hansard before bedtime. It happened this week. Here goes.
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Michael White on the financial crisis
The deepening financial crisis is changing how we look at everything now. For instance, aren't NHS finance directors glad they didn't have surpluses to invest unwisely during the years when Patricia Hewitt's stiletto was on their necks?
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Michael White on Conservative healthcare policy
On the conference circuit this autumn I've been conscious of being generous in my remarks about the prospect of a Conservative government in regard to its policies on the NHS.
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Michael White on the global financial crisis
By the time you read this, Labour's 2008 party conference in Manchester will be over and Gordon Brown will still be prime minister, despite whatever has happened or not in the interval.
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Michael White on the Liberal Democrats' conference
Apart from Norman Lamb's platform speech and a short midweek debate on the urgent needs of mental health, the health service wasn't very prominent on the Liberal Democrats' conference agenda in Bournemouth.
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Michael White on economic populism
Off the Calais ferry and straight back into the political melee this week, I certainly didn't feel the quiet August break had done much for Gordon Brown's government's prospects of recovery.
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Michael White on public health policy
Andrew Lansley seems to have been the first health politico to get off the beach and back in hot water this summer with that 'no excuses, no nannying' speech he made to the pro-market Reform think tank.
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Michael White on the golden age of the NHS
I have been sitting in patchy sunshine reading Rejuvenate or Retire? the Nuffield Trust's anthology to mark the NHS 60th anniversary.