ABSTRACT
The National Health Service is now twenty-four years old and yet a search of the literature reveals no major economic study and remarkably few attempts to even appraise it in economic terms. Such neglect of a major industry employing three-quarters of a million people and spending over £2000 million a year( https://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"> 5 1 2 https://s3-euw1-ap-pe-df-pch-content-public-p.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/9781315013633/4323b233-1866-4399-95ae-9f8137ff50f7/content/inline-eqn1_1_B.tif" xmlns:xlink="https://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"/> per cent of GNP) seems at first sight strange, but closer scrutiny reveals that many of the data essential to such an analysis still do not exist. More fundamentally, however, there was until very recently a widespread reluctance to even acknowledge that economic analysis had any place in the health field.
