Why I love the NHS, or: The NHS will be shown no mercy
I was at a restaurant last night, when everyone within heard a loud bang. A guy had abruptly passed out and smacked his head really hard on the door. He was unconscious, and his wife said he’d felt sick and was trying to get some air.
We called an ambulance. We didn’t think about this, didn’t ask the wife if her husband was insured—we just called. The ambulance arrived in 15 minutes and the guy—now conscious, if not entirely with it—was taken to hospital. He will be treated, regardless of what is wrong, and he will never be asked to part with huge sums of money.
Interestingly, we were dining with two people who’d been living on the USA (one Brit, one American), noting, sadly, that many Americans would think twice about the “hundreds of bucks” an ambulance call-out would cost, and that the idea of global healthcare remains largely demonised in the USA, most often by the people it’s designed to help (the non-rich).
From recent events, it’s clear for all David Cameron’s arguments to the contrary, he and the Tories don’t care about the NHS one bit. Mark Britnell, one of Cameron’s senior health advisors, according to Political Scrapbook, recently said:
In future, the NHS will be a state insurance provider not a state deliverer.
Talking to his corporate private health sector chums, he added:
The NHS will be shown no mercy and the best time to take advantage of this will be in the next couple of years.
This, of course, coincides with the government’s supposed ‘listening exercise’ regarding health reform.
For Tory MPs, the anti-NHS stance is logical for all kinds of reasons, not least the fact most Tories would happily do away with all socialist aspects of government. It’s unlikely many of them use the NHS, preferring to pay for private care; therefore, they neither have the experience of the NHS nor the ability to empathise with those who cannot afford to pay for an insurance-based system. As someone who’s self-employed and therefore wouldn’t be covered by an employer system, I also dread the thought of ‘NHS USA’, and suspect it would wreck UK entrepreneurialism.
But mostly, I think about random guy last night. We could not have gotten him medical care any more swiftly, and as the ambulance left the signs were good. But with a system where you do think and you do hesitate, that could cost vital minutes and lead to a very different result—all to make Conservatives happy about tearing down one of the finest socialist components the UK will ever see.
I love the NHS, despite its faults. It’s not perfect, but it’s there when we need it, universally. If you agree and your MP is Liberal Democrat, write to them and make it extraordinarily clear they won’t get your support in 2015 (or sooner, if the coalition doesn’t last its full term) unless they block this bill. If your MP is Conservative, argue the same (for all the good it will do). And if your MP is from any other party, ask them what they, specifically, are doing to save the NHS, while a spiteful, class-obsessed Tory-led government is doing its level best to tear it down.
In Switzerland, we switched form a single, government provider to a bunch of privatized providers. The idea was that the competition would lower prices.
Unsurprisingly, the opposite has happened. Private companies have more overhead than government providers, amongst other reasons because they need to advertise. And they’ll charge as much as they can get away with. Service also didn’t get better; the insurer’s incentive is to pay out as little as possible, since that’s how they make money. So they make your life hell exactly at a time when you can least afford another distraction.
It’s still a ton better than in the US, obviously.
I may have said this before, because I ask it everywhere but…
Does anyone have the slightest clue why the Americans hate “socialised healthcare” but have absolutely no trouble with “Socialised Police” and “Socialised Fire Brigade”.
Why is it THIS emergency service that’s apparently evil for the government to provide?
As someone who will have to rely on the NHS for the rest of my life due to a chronic condition (Crohn’s Disease), I am obviously in favour of retaining its “free at the point of service” ideal.
There is need for change and improvement in the service. But it should be the OPPOSITE of what the Tories are proposing – any trace of a market-based system should be removed.
From what I’ve seen and experienced, change is needed in the sense of upping specific standards at certain hospitals, rather than wholesale reform. At our local, for example, patient care is lacking with seniors and the staff are terrible at informing patients about pretty much anything, but everything else is good (including diagnosis and cure).
Privatisation of any form isn’t going to help matters in the slightest, nor will removing managers. (I’ve had GPs on Twitter telling me they’re already working 16-hour days, so how will they do admin work? They won’t—they’ll outsource, hence a big chunk of the NHS will be in private hands.) And as LKM says, privatisation always brings the need for profit, and so costs will rise regardless of what we end up with.
My hope here is that the Tories will either be blocked by the Liberal Democrats (in Last Chance Saloon—if they back the Tories on this, they are dead as a party; but block the legislation and they have a slim chance of a small recovery from 9%—perhaps back towards the mid-high teens they used to hold) or by the Tories themselves when they realise how toxic the legislation is. Still, what I’d most like to hear right now is Labour saying “if you privatise the NHS, we’ll reverse it in 2015”. Interesting that the supposed new lefty Labour is not saying anything of the sort.
@LKM, the same happened in the Netherlands: a market of compulsory private health insurance replaced a single system of government insurance. Now insurance prices are super-inflationary, and worse, the healthcare safety-net is considerably worse. Not a route I want Britain to go down either.
Having spent 36 years in the USA I can say that there is no *rational* explanation for american’s disdain for socialized medicine. There are however many marketing dollars spent on convincing citizens that socialized medicine means standing in line for six months to be treated for a heart attack. Basically, health care companies in the USA use their money and power to scare people into giving them more money and power.
It is how most things work in the USA: military contractors, unions, telecommunications companies, banks, big agriculture, oil, etc. Nobody talks about how the entire concept of for-profit health care is in direct opposition to decent, efficient health care. It’s part of the reason I’m moving to Scotland in two months.