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Bureaucracy In The NHS Essay

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Bureaucracy has existed ever since the establishment of the NHS, 5th July 1948. There have been many attempts to reform the NHS, yet the issue of bureaucracy still exists. The NHS aims to provide free healthcare to all to the point of free delivery. It also aims to care for patients and keep improving their services so that the NHS can remain efficient. However, we see in our day to day lives that this is not the case. In this essay, I will illustrate Friedrich von Hayek’s () ideas of free markets and apply it to the issue of bureaucracy in the NHS.
One of Hayek’s main thesis was that socialism would eventually lead to totalitarianism, () thus leading to control over all aspects of the economy. The NHS has been buried under bureaucracy, …show more content…

It had been believed by the conservative government that the introduction of CCGs would lead to increased competition and more choice. However there has been less insistence on competition and more emphasis on strengthening regulations and providing better patient safety.() Hayek would claim that placing more emphasis on regulations leads to an administrative system where all decisions are made and governed by officials. By privatising the NHS, free markets will be available, increasing competition and allowing better health care to be available. More private health cares would lead to more competition where doctors would compete for more patients by providing better health care which in turn then leads to oligopoly markets. The NHS is so complex that it cannot be understood by individuals who try to control markets and economies. Hayek believed that economies were too complex to be understood by individuals as only a small perspective is seen. This can be applied to the NHS, as the NHS is made up of many complex organisations that by intervening and trying to solve a problem, will only lead to more problems as only a small perspective is seen. It is therefore best to leave markets as they are and let the issues unfold

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