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Health and Social Care Bill (Programme) (No. 4)

That is the ideological difference between us. The hon. Gentleman says that the decision should be at the hospital's discretion, but the Bill essentially sets everybody on their own. Hospitals are being told, ““You're on your own. There's none of the support from the centre any more, no bail-outs, as the White Paper said. That's it, you're out there, you're competing in a market, and you've got to stand on your own two feet.”” I differ from that opinion because I want systems regulation and a role for the centre in deciding whether a hospital should greatly increase its treatment of private patients. This is not just a question of each individual hospital thinking about what it is going to do, because hospitals will have pressure on their bottom lines, as a colleague said earlier. They will be operating in a difficult financial context, and it might have a different effect on their individual interests. It might make sense for hospitals, individually, to increase the number of private patients, but it might not make sense for the NHS patients who live in that area, and that is the entire point: the Government are trading systems regulation for the individual decisions of local organisations, because that fits when we move to a competitive market in which every individual organisation is a competing business.