[etccarmageddon]

The Labour policy is to throw money at the problem to keep waiting lists within policital targets. The problem with this is that it simply takes staff away from the NHS as the people doing the private ops are the same people who work in the NHS! And you could view it as a political way of faking an improvement in the NHS.

The Conservative policy is to get you to throw half of you own money at it and half of the tax payers. The problem is though that no-one knows if this will encourage more 'well off' people to go private or will just make it cheaper for people who would have gone private anyway.