The odd maths behind the NHS fraud story

There’s lots of coverage in the news today about how much fraud there is the NHS, complete with Labour calling it a “scandal”.

Yet poke beneath the numbers and where do they come from? A very simple calculation of what the total level of fraud would be if the NHS suffered from the same amount of fraud as on average other health systems around the world do.

That’s a decent benchmark to think about – but it also means rather oddly that lots of the news stories are telling us how shocked we should be if fraud in the NHS were … not shockingly high, but average.

Not quite so shocking – and noticeably missing from nearly all the reports.