Doctors' group calls for new ways to fund health care

For the NHS to meet the expectations of patients in the future, it may need to be funded by a system of compulsory insurance or similar means, rather than through taxation, a new lobby group said last week.

Five hundred members of Doctors for Reform put their names to a full page advertisement in the Times last week (25 February, p 18), saying that the moment had come to look at new ways to supply and fund health care while keeping it equitably available.

“The NHS as we know it has had its day,” said one of the group's founders, Professor Karol Sikora, in an interview with the paper. “Everything else we need today we can get very easily: air travel, holidays, cars. …