How should money be shared out fairly between places?

Since 1976 the NHS has shared its money between places by formula, following the Resource Allocation Working Party, and Gwyn has spent four decades on what that formula should do and where it goes wrong. The formula rests on an estimate of how much illness each population carries beyond what its age and sex account for; he and Sheldon and Davey Smith called the attempt “weighting in the dark”. Below the region, the same question gets harder: a hospital treats people from across boundaries, so who should pay for them, and how should a district’s allocation change as patients flow in and out? When primary care groups took on budgets in the late 1990s, he asked whether the government was prepared to take equity seriously when the money reached general practice, and what the total purchasing pilots showed about the risks of handing GPs the budget.