Many other countries provide better healthcare without the state being the provider (they just provide the funding).”

If you check out the OECD data with regard to the proportion of private/public healthcare spend as a proportion of GDP, you will find that the UK spend mix is roughly in line with the OECD average, and that nations with a higher percentage of private healthcare are not at all entirely top performers.

The spend figures can be found in the OECD Factbook,

http://oberon.sourceoecd.org/vl=8219516/cl=17/nw=1/rpsv/factbook2009/10/02/01/10-02-01-g1.htm

Compare with the rankings found in the article from Health Consumer Powerhouse.

http://www.healthpowerhouse.com/files/UK.pdf

The Netherlands healthcare system, ranked first, is a public healthcare system, not a private one, it is also heavily regulated by the government and payments towards insurance are collected by the government. You will note the public/private mix as per the OECD Factbook is roughly the same as the UK. So your correlation in favour of the private sector fails.

You miss the point.

Those countries spend more, but they do not provide the healthcare, they provide the funding.

Many other countries provide better healthcare without the state being the provider (they just provide the funding).

I see no reason why the NHS has to be owned or run as a goverment entity as it is, and THAT is what this whole thing has been turned into (You only have to look at the top of this page “Keep our NHS PUBLIC).

You say:

“Why are these people not looking at the fact that WHO ranks the UK NHS in the 20s wheras countries that have privatatly provided BUT state funded healthcare (which is basically what this bill is about) sitting in 1-5th place?”

Is it simply a question of private versus public funding, or do the results reflect the results of a larger spend on healthcare? For example France and Germany spend a higher percentage of GDP on healthcare as opposed to the comparable spend of the UK.

A second point to note is that country by country comparisons may not accurately reflect the differences that may occur between nations, as the article by David Beemer alludes

“The WHO ranking was ambitious in its scope, grading each nation’s health care on five factors. Two of these were relatively uncontroversial: health level, which is roughly the average healthy lifespan of a nation’s residents; and responsiveness, which is a sort of customer-service rating encompassing factors such as the system’s speed, choice and quality of amenities. The other three measure inequality in health-care outcomes; responsiveness; and individual spending.”
“These last three measures struck some analysts as problematic, because a country with unhealthy people could rank above a healthier one where there was a bigger gap between healthy and unhealthy people. It is certainly possible that spreading health care as evenly as possible makes a society healthier, but the rankings struck some health-care researchers as assuming that, rather than demonstrating it….”

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB125608054324397621.html

See, where the money goes is also of vital importance to us; for you and others to turn round and sneer that all we should be bothered with is that its ‘free at the point of use’ is profoundly insulting. Here endeth the lesson.

Why is privatising the NHS instinctivly a bad thing, NO ONE is talking about changing the “free at point of use” part of our healthcare.

Why does it matter that it is public or private run?

Why are these people not looking at the fact that WHO ranks the UK NHS in the 20s wheras countries that have privatatly provided BUT state funded healthcare (which is basically what this bill is about) sitting in 1-5th place?

I don’t understand the resistance to this bill other than some idillic moral crusade about protecting public sector intrests.

What about the paitents who are recieving declining healthcare at ever increasing costs?

What matters is that through internal, democratic dialogue, the Lib Dem membership made its position on the Bill clear at Conference – and now expects its representatives in Parliament to deliver the amendments we set out.