Kelly’s Eye

THE merest suggestion of paying for aspects of our health care, like most other countries do, is regarded as a supposedly unspeakable heresy.

Or is it? Newly published research shows that the number of patients forced to pay for private chemotherapy has reached a record high – up 32 per cent in three years. Hardly surprising with 6.2 million people currently on waiting lists.And it’s feared that figure could yet leap to 11 million.

As in so many other fields, the true cost of the authoritarian madness that gripped us during lockdown is now becoming apparent.The NationalAudit Office recently warned that up to 740,000 potential cancer cases that should have been urgently referred by GPs have been “missed” since the first lockdown.

Meanwhile online searches for the cost of private hip operations has risen by 1,000 per cent in 12 months; for private MRI scans by 250 per cent, and for cataract ops by 60 per cent.

Those figures tell a very different story from the claim, endlessly wheeled out, that the NHS is the envy of the world.

It really isn’t, as anyone with friends from other European countries knows.

Our neighbours (whose equivalent services achieve better health outcomes than ours by most measurements), are always slightly puzzled by the idol we make of the NHS, and our apparent indignation for paying into schemes for something as important as our health, when we think nothing of making monthly instalments for comparatively trivial consumer goods.

Instead we are enjoined to continue pouring public money into a broken system, menaced with the bogeyman of American health care as if that is the inevitable consequence of reforming our own, and condemned for so much as debating any other alternatives.

But at some point we are going to have to grasp that nettle.The cancer patients going private already have.