We need cooperation rather than competition

A year or two from now general practitioners will be in charge of the NHS budget in England, except in a few specialist areas. Pages of analysis and comment have been written since the white paper was published last July, and the main concerns of the various stakeholders are well documented, boiling down to competition law, sly privatisation, cherry picking of the profitable patients, and the widening gap in health inequality. On the cheerier side, it is taken as read that family doctors are best placed to decide what their patients need and how they can provide for those needs. It’s great to see this unquestioning faith in good old GPs who, a blink of an eye ago, were accused of being fat cats with the new GP contract and never available when their patients wanted them.

Luckily, the businessman Sir Gerry Robinson asked recently on BBC Newsnight, “What evidence is there that GPs know what is best for their patients?” There have been successful pockets of practice …