Healthy Enterprise

A health profiteering company has been caught using Duncan Smith tactics in its advertising. The catchily-named Bestmedicalcover, based in the British Virgin Islands tax haven, is so sure of its own virtues that its best hope of selling insurance was to lie about the NHS. The company's advertisement cited Sir Bruce Keogh's report to the effect that 13,000 people had died needlessly on the NHS as a result of negligence, and added that private insurance could "provide peace of mind" and "quite literally save your life". There was a minor problem; namely that the quoted figure does not appear in Keogh's report, which explicitly said that any attempt to provide such statistics would be misleading. Jeremy C Hunt has denied all responsibility, and the Advertising Standards Authority has given Britishmedicalcover a bit of a dressing down; which doubtless means that, in the event of a Daveybloke majority in 2015, Hunt will be promoted, Bestmedicalcover will get a contract and the ASA will be abolished.