A price to pay for a free NHS
My little sister Viv died in a hospital two years ago. She’d had two heart attacks, and the dedication of doctors and nurses who battled to keep her alive was awe-inspiring. It bought her more precious time with her family.
When I walked around the hospital, I saw the strain on the faces of staff. Corridors and ambulances crammed with sick people on trolleys. Back then, more than 144,000 people a month were waiting more than four hours to be seen in English hospitals. Now it’s over 214,000.
These aren’t just figures or statistics. They’re your grandmother who’s had a nasty fall. It’s your wife with pregnancy complications. Or it’s little Jack Harwood who had to rest in A&E on a couple of plastic chairs because there wasn’t a bed.
When Jeremy Corbyn raised his case at Prime Minister’s Question Time, May shrugged it off as one of a “small number of incidents”. That will be a phrase that will haunt her.
Increasingly we’re also seeing more people with psychiatric problems turning up at A&E. Last year 165,000 people with serious mental health issues had to be seen at A&E because there was no care at home.
It’s the same with the elderly. They can’t be discharged because the Government slashed social care budgets for councils, so hospitals have to step in.
As the Royal College of Physicians warned this week, the NHS is “underfunded, under-doctored and overstretched”.
But still, Theresa May does nothing. If you add up all the tax cuts for big companies, high wage earners and the well-off she plans to give away until the end of this Parliament, it’s a staggering £70bn.
At the very least, she could use some of that to get us by for the next couple of years. But we need a longterm funding solution and we must face up to the fact that if we want a world-class free health service we’re all going to have to pay for it.
When Labour launched the NHS in 1948, we had a population of 50million and the average life expec- tancy was 66 for men and 71 for women. Today we have 63million and men are living to 77 and women 81.
By 2027, we’ll hit the 70million mark. If you think we have a crisis in the NHS and social care now, you ain’t seen nothing yet.
Three years ago I highlighted that the Government sat on a surplus of £30billion from National Insurance payments. It’s called the National Insurance Fund, which George Osborne used as collateral to borrow against. That’s exactly the same figure that was the funding gap in the NHS.
But yet again, that won’t solve the problem in the long term.
Increasing the amount we pay in National Insurance might. If the money was truly ringfenced and not just put in the Treasury pot, an extra 1p could generate at least £4billion a year for health and social care. And70 per cent of the public said they wouldn’t mind paying for it IF it was solely spent on the NHS.
But what’s vital is that we plan for the long term. And that means a cross-party consensus on finding a long-term funding plan for the NHS
The last time the parties attempted to get agreement was to find a funding solution for social care – when Labour was in government in 2010.
The talks were held in secret until Cameron and Osborne broke ranks and claimed Labour wanted to impose a £20,000 “death tax” and splashed it on posters across the country. When they won the election, they did nothing.
Typical Bullingdon Boy idiots. Cause a mess and let someone else sort it out.
But sort it we must. So it’s time that all parties sat down and found an agreement to solve this crisis for good.
The long-term care of our sick and elderly should be above petty party politics. So let all parties come together to ensure we can still get that care from the cradle to the grave.
It’s what Viv would have wanted.