Kentish Gazette Canterbury & District
NHS needs scrapping, not saving
‘We’ve been here before. In fact, we’re always here. The NHS seems locked in perpetual crisis with no way out’
There was something rather melancholy about the hospital march through Canterbury on Saturday. It lacked the tubthumping reverie of the hospital marches of two decades ago.
It was then that the campaign group Concern for Health in East Kent (Chek), organiser of Saturday’s event, was born.
That reminds us: we’ve been here before. In fact, we’re always here. The NHS seems locked in perpetual crisis with no way out.
The reason Chek has been resurrected is because of the serious threat to services at the Kent and Canterbury Hospital.
Don’t get me wrong, I’d love to see a fully functioning hospital in Canterbury – I just don’t think the National Health Service can provide it.
Approaching its 70th birthday, the NHS is struggling with the 21st century world. Today’s NHS crisis isn’t economic or organisational – it is existential.
The question we ought to be asking ourselves isn’t how we can save the NHS, but rather how we can replace it.
More importantly, we must ask ourselves how we can remove politics from the provision of healthcare. For far too long the NHS has become the plaything of governments and politicians who exploit it to burnish their own images.
And yet they prove time and again that the NHS is fundamentally incapable of providing the healthcare the nation requires.
NHS doctor Max Pemberton spelled this out in an article last month: “For years, money has been thrown into an antiquated, creaking system that can’t adapt quickly enough to keep up with the demands being placed on it.
“As a result, the NHS is a confused hotchpotch of shortterm solutions imposed in a haphazard and uncoordinated way on an anachronistic model.”
Life expectancy is now 13 years higher than it was when the health service was formed in 1948.
The average person of 65 suffers from one chronic health condition, people of 75 have two and people over 65 take up two-thirds of hospital beds. A person who reaches the age of 85 costs the taxpayer five times more than a person of 30.
Moreover, we are better than ever at diagnosing ailments. As medical technology advances the cost of providing healthcare is ballooning so much so that even factoring in inflation, the cost of it is 10 times higher than it was in 1948.
Yet all we hear is “the NHS needs more money”. But who’s going to pay for it? The last people I want spending more of my money for me are politicians and bureaucrats who I know from bitter experience will use it badly.
The NHS is already replete with diversity commissars, carbon emission officers and healthy eating co-ordinators. It is already enormously wasteful and bureaucratic.
But there is one reason above all others why healthcare provision in this country cannot progress to proper reform: politics. It is regarded as electoral suicide to even suggest for a second that there might be an alternative to a National Health Service.
For a start no political party can ignore that it has 1.4 million employees across every constituency in the land, a vast client state they can manipulate to accumulate votes in their quests for power.
Just look at the way that every political party made sure it had a presence at Saturday’s march through Canterbury, which looked like a solemn act of worship.
Indeed, Nigel (now Lord) Lawson once said: “The NHS is the closest thing the English people have to a religion.”
Danny Boyle’s horrendous London 2012 Olympic opening ceremony with its atrocious prancing nurses only reinforces the idea that the NHS has the status of an acne cream and orthopaedic back pillow dispensing deity.
It is spoken of in terms such as “hallowed” and “sacred” while frontline medical staff are referred to as “saints”. All this is the language of faith.
The Guardian newspaper called on its readers to explain “why you love the NHS”.
Love the NHS? I can’t pretend to love the NHS any more than I love roundabouts or clingfilm. They all serve a purpose. That’s it.
But if the purpose of the NHS is not being met, then what is it for?
Before he died AA Gill wrote in the Sunday Times Magazine how the cancer drug he needed was not available on the NHS and how despite being an avowed supporter of the service, he was forced to pay for private treatment.
It’s not that the treatment we get on the NHS is substandard – it’s that trying to access it is routinely impeded by a constipated bureaucracy.
I’ve had more than a dozen operations on my head for a serious – and rare – condition I suffer from. I’ve been under the care of a consultant in Birmingham whose procedures have been largely successful, until Christmas when I noticed it had begun to worsen. So I asked in January whether I could see him, but was told the next available appointment was in July.
Time and again I hear from sensible people not overcome by an ideological obsession with the NHS that they would go private if they had the money.
Well, we do have the money. But politicians, for their own purposes, take it from us and spend it for us when we would be far better-served by dealing directly with private providers and allowing the marketplace, rather than a system of rationing, to attend to our healthcare needs.
If we want a first-rate hospital in Canterbury then we must be willing to accept that it won’t be one provided by the NHS.
I’m well aware that I risk being burned at the stake for this act of heresy, but here goes. Someone has to say it: It’s time to scrap the NHS.