I pay £6,000 a year in tax to the NHS, so why am I refused a hernia op?

As he learns sex addicts may get free treatment, ROSS CLARK asks ...

The telltale signs of a hernia appeared a few weeks ago with almost uncanny timing. I am exactly the same age — 51 — at which my father suffered the same problem.

But back then, in the eighties, even though waiting lists were considered a national scandal, he fairly swiftly had an operation at the local hospital, spent a few days recuperating at home and all was well.

After putting it off for a few weeks, I summoned the courage to visit my own GP. I assumed the same awaited me — a short operation on the NHS. The only difference, I imagined, given how the Government keeps boasting about having reduced waiting lists, was that presumably I would be put under the knife even quicker.

The reaction took me aback. The female GP lay me on a couch for an examination. She agreed that yes, the swelling did indicate a hernia. In fact, there was a bit of weakness on the other side, too, so it might even be a double hernia. Then came the bad news. Sorry, but it wasn’t bad enough to qualify for funding under new NHS guidelines. I wasn’t in pain, and I didn’t have to do any heavy lifting in my job.

‘The NHS doesn’t have any money,’ she said. ‘In the past you would have been offered a routine operation. But now I can’t even refer you to a specialist, I’m afraid.’

If I wanted an operation — reinforcing the abdominal wall with mesh — I could have it done privately. Otherwise, I would just have to live with it.

Like many people, I saw last week’s 70th anniversary of the NHS as something to celebrate. I am not so sure it still deserves the accolade its founder Nye Bevan bestowed upon it in the Forties that it is ‘the envy of the world’.

But I have always supported the principle of a national health service which is there for everyone, regardless of means.

I have never resented paying taxes to the NHS — even though I have been fortunate to enjoy good health and only very occasionally call on its services. Indeed, in the five years since I last went to see a doctor I have paid over £150,000 in income tax and National Insurance.

Given that the NHS consumed nearly 19 per cent of total government spending last year, it is fair to say I have contributed around £30,000 specifically to the NHS in that time. That has never bothered me because I thought the money amounted to a health insurance policy for myself and my family.

But it is pretty galling, after having paid all that tax, to find the NHS turning its back on me and refusing to offer an operation which used to be routine.

AS for getting the job done privately, I’ve been given an estimate of £2,895 to have the hernia on one side repaired — or £3,995 if an examination revealed that the other side of my abdominal wall needs treating, too.

I suppose I could probably afford that if I were really suffering, but there are many people who couldn’t. Do we really have to wait until a hernia becomes painful before having it seen to?

Well, frankly, no. Because the assertion by my GP, and by many others, that the ‘NHS doesn’t have any money’ is laughable.

Consider the figures. In 1988, when the NHS seemed capable of funding hernia operations like my father’s, taxpayers were spending £50 billion (in today’s money) on the NHS — then equivalent to 4 per cent of GDP. By 2016/17 that had mushroomed to £145 billion — or 7 per cent of GDP.

Of course the NHS has money — it is just a question of how it is being spent.

While an ageing population has increased the burden on the health service, money seems to be plentiful for fashionable causes demanded by shouty pressure groups. Last month, the NHS announced it was opening its first ‘internet addiction clinic’ — in response to the World health Organisation (WHO) declaring ‘gaming disorder’ to be a mental health condition.

This week the WHO, never an organisation to miss out on a passing bandwagon, similarly decided that ‘sex addiction’ is a mental health condition — so no doubt we will see NHS clinics popping up for that, too.

Dr Valerie Voon, from the Royal College of Psychiatrists, said: ‘The classification of compulsive sexual behaviour disorder as a mental illness is excellent news for patients. The next step is for . . . specialist services to become available for sufferers.’

So there you are. You and I will have to pay for treatment for people who can’t stop having sex — possibly including the entire cast of Love Island.

Then there is the £22 million a year being spent on transgender surgery, at a cost of £20,000 per patient. There is £730 million a year being spent pumping drug addicts full of Methadone — a heroin substitute which is supposed to help wean people off that drug, but which is itself addictive.

Meanwhile, GPs are giving away free electronic cigarettes on prescription — in spite of the fact they cost smokers no more than the conventional cigarettes they are trying to give up.

The NHS has started, too, to prescribe PREP — a drug which cuts the risk of HIV transmission in gay men who have sex without a condom.

It is prescribing the drug —which costs £400 a month for a single patient — in spite of warnings that it will be encouraging risky behaviour, and it could increase other infections such as syphilis and gonorrhea, against which PREP offers no protection.

And you wonder why there’s no money left for a hernia op.

The NHS tries to justify its penny-pinching on hernia surgery by claiming a ‘watch and wait’ strategy is better where a hernia is causing no symptoms other than a painless bulge. But that misses the point, that the type I have — which accounts for 75 per cent of all hernias — might be little bother when it appears, but will tend to grow with time until it becomes painful and uncomfortable, and possibly even dangerous.

But that’s not the end of the story. The trouble for hernia patients like me is that a disproportionate number of us are middle-aged men — a group which is pretty well bottom when it comes to healthcare priorities.

Indeed, there seems to be a very different approach to female patients with hernias.

WHEN I studied the commissioning guide prepared for GPs by the National Institute for Clinical excellence (NICE) for 2013, I found it called for doctors to treat ‘all hernias in women as urgent referrals’.

It is similar to how male cancer patients seem to come off worse: prostate cancer receives half the research funding that goes to breast cancer, even though the disease kills more.

All of which brings us to the thorny question of whether the current model of NHS funding is the most sensible.

even before the new health Secretary, Matt hancock, had got his feet under his desk on Wednesday, he was being accused of having some secret mission to abolish the NHS —on the grounds that he has received some funding as an MP from an academic who advocates replacing it with a U.S.-style insurance-based healthcare system.

I don’t want that — it would inevitably leave some people, as in the U.S., falling through the net and not having any healthcare insurance. But I am forced to admit that in my case it would work out cheaper.

The average American pays £226 a month for private health insurance, compared with the £500 a month I have been paying the NHS in tax. And —shock, horror! — I might actually have been offered treatment for my payments.

The NHS has just won another boost to its income, with the Government promising an extra £20 billion by 2023/24.

We can only hope that, in contrast to Gordon Brown’s spending splurge in the early 2000s, the extra cash won’t just disappear in pay rises for staff — including all those militant doctors who went on strike to oppose Jeremy hunt’s plan for a ‘seven-day NHS’.

In the meantime, is too much to suggest that if the health service wants to retain support, it will have to stop turning away patients who are paying for it, and start offering the routine procedures like hernia surgery it always used to?