According to 2007 statistics, as many as 12.5 per cent of the UK population has private medical insurance policies. Over two and a half million people in the UK have private health care provided direct by their employer.

Genuine question on this point. How many people in 1997 had private health insurance? If, as you suggest, the rise in NHS waiting lists of the last two years is a result of people not having private medical insurance, it seems a fair comparison to 1997 (or 1998 if that’s when reporting methods changed) would include the number of people with private medical insurance.

As a quick check, the only stats I can find suggest that in 2000, 11.5% of people in the UK had private insurance. If that number was 12.5% in 2007, that suggests around 600,000 more people went private between those years. The graph above shows total waiting was around 1.05 million in 2000 and fell to around 650,000 in 2007. But then, that’s a fall of 400,000 during a time when 600,000 went private.

If anyone can find some more robust numbers I’d be interested to see, but from a very quick look it seems the reduction in NHS waiting times is pretty much all explained by people taking private medical insurance.

I keep getting recalled for meetings with my consultant, which keeps me far away from any government waiting lists/targets. So far, this has been going since March 2007. My consultant tells me this will keep going on till i either can’t walk and become an urgent case, or by some mircale I get high up enough on the waiting list. He advised me to go private if I could, and apologised for the charade he was being forced into because of waiting list targets.

Not that I’m in any way surprised though. Several Doctor friends have made no bones about how they are forced by their managers to fiddle statistics to serve government dictat. A&E patients being shoved onto wards or simply not admitted is a common one, as well as the one above.

The point I’m really making is this – Labour’s tractor production statistics are not really believed by anyone any more. Same with crime statistics. If you change the rules of reference, you aren’t collating the same statistcs. Not to mention the small army of beauracrats whose job is dependent on managing targets in the governments chosen direction. Managing…not actually doing.

That is the nub of it really – Labour have confused the difference betweeen action and soundbite, doing and talking.

I know this from personal inside information. The data is simply corrupt.

Maybe. Or maybe because people who do not have insurance can no longer manage to pay the cost of private treatment. In 2006-7 there were around 200,000 ops carried out in private hospitals on patients who had no insurance, but were finding the money somehow.

To a patient, whether one is on a ‘waiting list for an operation’ or merely on ‘a waiting list to get onto a waiting list for an operation’ is a distinction without a difference.

To an NHS bureaucrat or a Labour minister, however, the distinction is crucial.

Can you provide any pretty graphs that show that times from ‘first consultation with a specialist’ to operation have reduced half so dramatically?

I only ask because my wife has now been ‘waiting three years for an operation’ – in the usual sense of that phrase. But in the bureaucratic/statistical sense she hasn’t been waiting at all – she has simply been recalled for successive meetings with a consultant who explains that he cannot refer her yet because the Trust would not be able to deliver the treatment within the required timescale.

Kafka didn’t know the half of it.