LAST month, there were warnings of an "unprecedented and unsustainable" problem in the NHS, the scale of which had become so severe that it was currently worse than at any point since records began.

Only a radical solution, it was said, could turn the situation around.

Hyperbole is not unusual when it comes to the political football that is the health service. What set this intervention apart, however, was that the doomsday premonitions were not spilling from the mouths of axe-grinding opposition MSPs or unions shackled to narrow agendas, but directly from the country's second-largest health board.

According to NHS Lothian it was not staffing shortages - which have led to medics being flown in from far flung corners of the globe to plug rota gaps in some parts of the country - that was causing the top brass sleepless nights. The problem, the health board said, was bed blocking.

This is when a patient is well enough to leave hospital but has nowhere to go because an appropriate place - a care home bed for example -is not available. Equally, carers to visit them at home may be in short supply.

As topics for dinner table chat go, a surgeon with a penchant for branding his initials on internal organs or even spiralling cancer or GP waiting times, it ain't. But if bed blocking had a profile proportionate to the problem it causes in hospitals across the land, some senior heads would have been rolling long ago.

How has it got so bad? The problem is complex but part of the answer is relatively simple. Hospitals are the responsibility of the NHS but the care home places and carers are provided by councils. And while health budgets are protected, the councils' have been slashed. We are left with an absurd situation in which pensioners are expensively languishing in state-of-the-art hospitals because there are too few bog-standard care home beds.

The SNP have attempted to address the dilemma with an integration agenda, in which health boards and councils will share budgets and work closely together. It may well improve the situation, in time, but the current crisis is a symptom of a wider issue with local authority funding.

Freezing the council tax has been a vote winner, but after seven years, the time has surely come for the issue to be revisited. One SNP councillor told me recently that "extreme austerity" was on the cards for his patch. The boss could justifiably point to budget restraints imposed by London, but it is an assessment that hardly fits with her anti-poverty rhetoric.

Tomorrow, Nicola Sturgeon will set out her first Programme for Government. We can expect radical policies on land reform, education and domestic abuse but there is little sign that the elephant in the room - funding for local government - is on the agenda.

The SNP promised in 2007 to abolish the council tax and introduce a more progressive means-based levy. Then austerity hit, the idea was parked amid strong opposition and it has remained in the long grass. It may not prove the solution but if the First Minister is looking to test the idea of "consensus" politics she floated last week, an honest debate on council funding may well prove a decent starting point.