To me, that last few posts are about presentation, rather than the underlying reality. I agree with Nigel to the extent that I don't think percentage of GDP is a particularly good way of deciding what your spend on the NHS should be. One reason is because if the GDP fell there should not be an automatic corresponding fall in the money going to the NHS. The one is a measure of how interested the world is in your product, the other a function of the population size and age distribution. I don't see an automatic link between those two. Indeed if the GDP fell but the NHS spending stayed constant then as a percentage of GDP we would appear to be spending more on the NHS even though in financial terms we were spending exactly the same.

On the other hand, if the country's GDP does rise so there is more money available to spend then it is certainly right to consider how much of that should go to the NHS, so as a broad brush I would expect a rising GDP to lead to a rising NHS spend, but not in any automatic fashion.