Private healthcare could become ‘a new normal’ as NHS grows weaker

Sector’s boom times look here to stay as desperate patients seek care and more people take medical insurance

• Private hospitals ‘cannibalising’ NHS in England by doing 10% of elective operations
• ‘My GP suggested it’: Britons explain why they went private for surgery

It is boom time in private healthcare. It has never been, or needed to be, a big provider of diagnostics and treatment in the UK before. The NHS’s provision of care to everyone, free at the point of delivery, has seen to that. That also explains why take-up of private medical insurance has remained stuck at about 10% of the population. The health service’s mere existence left little room for the private sector to expand.

However, the NHS’s fragile state – it still gives people mostly high-quality care, it just cannot do that quickly any more – is a historic opportunity for the private sector to go from small to significant. It could become what one expert calls “a new normal” – a not unusual place where people get treated.