Money alone won’t make our NHS well
WHAT’S the quickest way to tell a general election is on the way? To watch our politicians falling over themselves telling us how they’d splurge countless billions on the NHS. In the vast majority of instances, those making these promises have never run a company and struggle to run a bath but none of that dissuades them from the firm belief that throwing more cash at a problem solves it.
What utter ill-informed cobblers. If you gave the people who make cornflakes more money, would the product taste any better? Of course not, but to these economic minnows it’s the solution.
The Labour Party promised to plough countless extra billions into the NHS last week which prompted the Conservatives to remind us they’ve spent more than any previous government on the service and are also ready to spend more.
We all cherish the NHS and due to the reverence and love so many have for it, it’s close to a religion in this country. But you have to accept it has a series of problems at its core and while money will obviously help, it is in no way the only solution.
The annual budget for the NHS is already £166billion. That equates to more than £3billion each week. Are these hopeless politicians really saying we just throw more cash at it?
The harsh truth is we need a detailed audit trail of where the existing NHS funds go. A report last year showed some shocking examples of how fortunes are misspent. For instance, while one hospital was buying packs of rubber gloves for 35p, another was spending £16.47p. Toilet rolls at one hospital cost 34p while another was spending 76p per roll.
One hospital paid £90,000 for a bizarrely named “turnaround director” who worked for only three months! Another £640million was spent on management consultants hired to tell hospitals how to spend less money!
Regrettably, many of us are to blame too. The NHS loses £1billion each year on patients who fail to show up for hospital appointments and £300million on prescribing medicines that are never used. Prescriptions for gluten-free food cost £26million, despite the fact supermarkets sell the products more cheaply.
Additionally, we all know that in these supposed “green” times, we are urged to
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THE FINGER pointing and blame game concerning the speed of response to the large-scale flooding of parts of the East Midlands,yorkshire and Lincolnshire have begun. Arguments about the level of preparedness and standard of defence also rage. Many point to £20million-worth of vital work that, they claim, has not been done and others say some of the disastrous consequences are down to austerity cuts.
In truth, it will be some time before an accurate picture emerges. But as it was also revealed last week that our foreign aid budget spent £45million on absurd overseas “nanny state” projects such as £7.9million urging people in China to add less salt to their cooking and £1.5million to the Indian government so they could send out a raft of text messages urging their citizens to cut down on boozing, it seems fair to suggest some of that might have been better spent at home.
After all, you wouldn’t feed next door’s children before you’d fed your own, would you? recycle and repair wherever possible – so how come £18million is spent on new walking frames and crutches when old equipment could easily be recycled?
Let’s get one thing straight: the NHS is one of the crown jewels of this country. It’s saved the lives of members of my family and has cured me from a variety of ills, but it cannot be put right by just getting the cheque book out.
Accepting entirely that as the biggest employer in the UK and fifth-biggest employer on the planet with 1.5 million workers and a wages bill of £50billion there is always going to be waste, surely the case for stringent accounting has been made by the figures.
The absurdity of Labour’s claims was underscored by the fact that it wants to move the nation to a four-day week. It appears to have blithely ignored the implications that would have for the NHS, but the Centre for Policy Studies think tank has estimated that the added cost for the whole public sector would be anywhere between £17billion and £45billion. Labour’s economics really do belong only in a sixth-form debating class.
Without doubt, our National Health Service is a suitable case for treatment. But a reckless spend, spend, spend approach without putting in a tough accounting structure is not the healthy solution.
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A MAN trying to become prime minister suggests it would have been better to try to arrest the world’s most wanted terrorist, Abu Bakr al-baghdadi, who blew himself up with a suicide vest during a US attack. Jeremy Corbyn then seems to dispute the sequence of events as provided by the US. Imagine how the military or security services might feel with him as PM.
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THERE are plans to reverse the disastrous Beeching cuts from the 1960s that saw thousands of miles of railway track and hundreds of stations closed. Doesn’t that make much more sense than the £88billion HS2 project?