Their's for life, or half anyway

There is a recommendation that dentists, because they have been trained at state expense, must work for the state for half their time. The New Local Government Network has made this suggestion recently. "Half their life"apparently means half of the working week.

Is this serious? You must spend your whole life, say forty years, bound to the state? Admittedly consultants work for ninety percent of their time for the state, if they wish to engage in private practice.

The question should be asked why dentists have been leaving the public service in droves. It is apparently not a matter of incomes. Is it a matter of conditions of service in some other respect?
Is it that they are leaving because of the stultifying regulations they must endure in the bureaucratic public service? Is it that they feel that they cannot co the best they would wish for their NHS patients because they are severely restricted in what they can do?

It seems a regularly encountered problem in socialised medicine, until Brown threw money at GPs. An inflexible decision is made in one aspect which causes problems elsewhere. A politically imposed decision at other than what the economist would call a "market-clearing equilibrium " will result in problems elsewhere. This is compounded currently by the vain attempt by Brown to save money.

So what happens to a dentist who resigns from the NHS? Is he or she to be pursued to claim back some of the training costs? If so, are we to pursue vets, or lawyers, or architects, or anyone else who chooses to change his method of working? What if he goes abroad, which is what many disillusioned practitioners have done, or retires early?

Does this not represent a partial form of slavery?

The solution would be to give consumers a voucher, to a certain value, and let them shop around.
This would produce an efficient outcome and overcome this bureaucratic nonsense.