Despite committing to £7bn in additional annual funding for the NHS, Liberal Democrat healthcare plans would still leave our healthcare system with a material shortfall.
The Lib Dems' pledge to create an independent pay body means that the bulk of this expenditure would go on wages, despite their belief that it could fund 8,000 new GPs and guarantee access to an NHS dentist for all.
Ultimately, despite more spending, the Lib Dems plans would still leave us with a worse NHS than was promised by the Tories before the pandemic.
This brief rundown of the main manifestos reveals one thing: wherever you place your X in the box tomorrow, there will be insufficient cash for health.
With around 0.2 per cent CAGR difference in NHS funding between the Conservatives and Labour over the next parliament and 0.5 per cent between the Lib Dems and the Conservatives, nobody is committing to anything but a significant shortfall compared to planned spending under the 2018 NHS spending plan in inflation-adjusted terms.
In short, to misquote D:Ream, things can only get worse.
With this bleak situation on the horizon, we should all be taking our future health into our own hands.
That means that when clients are having discussions with their financial advisers about future planning and investments, they should include the assumption that their later years will require them to either have a healthcare savings account to pay for private care, such as orthopaedics, or private medical insurance to help cover urgent care outside of the pressured NHS sector.
They might also want to register with one of the local private GP services currently mushrooming across the country, because we cannot see things getting better in primary care any time soon.
Paul Major is manager of Bellevue Healthcare Trust plc
