Following reading Roger Taylor’s excellent article on the failings of the NHS last week, I have now got round to reading this follow up from Jenny Diski. It just annoyed me!
By the end of the article I feel the author had lost her way a little:
“The British public are irrational and deluded about their NHS, attached sentimentally to it as if it were our darling child. I am certainly one of that mind.”
Well, she has just successfully negated the entirety of her article by admitting that she herself is deluded about the NHS! But disregarding this, she also posits that:
“And what if the NHS doesn’t cost too much and isn’t spiralling towards impossible budgets, because, as the French believe, the point of a nationalised health system is that you spend whatever is needed to keep it going because it is the basis of the welfare of society?”
I would love to hear, from people who actually believe this, how we can just keep on throwing the money that is needed at the NHS? Where is this bottomless pot of money coming from? Ironically, France does not have a nationalised system like us. It has a clever system which combines private and public sectors to provide universal health coverage to all. Most citizens receive their insurance through their employer and almost everyone has supplemental private insurance (source: World Health Report 2000).
As Roger Taylor has already proved, the NHS is costing the state too much money not because of the ageing population, but due to the sheer cost of modern medicine and technology. We didn’t have this problem in the 60’s and 70’s simply because medicine wasn’t as advance as it is today.
Why should we suffer and lose ground on breakthrough medicines when other countries, such as the US, strive forward and have some of the best medical research facilities in the world? Whilst the US system is far from perfect, my own experience of it over the last year has been faultless. I spent some time researching a dermatologist for a long-term complaint I suffer with that no UK GP has ever had the time or resources to deal with. Fair enough, I had always thought, it’s not life threatening and I can live with it. However, I thought I would see how the US treatment would compare and I was astounded. The dermatologist I chose was one of the leading doctors in his field and I was able to find out about his career history, from where he graduated to his most recent published paper. When we met, he was professional, caring and certainly knew his stuff. He prescribed something I had never heard of. Within one month of using the medication, I was cured. This was something I had had, on and off, for nine years. NINE YEARS. Admittedly, I was shocked by the cost of the prescription. If I didn’t have medical insurance, the whole process would have set me back $1500. Perhaps that is why my UK GP did not, or could not prescribe that medication to me; the NHS was not prepared to invest that much in something I could, technically, live with. But why should I, if I didn’t have to?
No healthcare system will ever be perfect, but until we can start to admit that targets need to be geared towards successful care rather than money and that some sort of competition does need to be incorporated into our system to maintain standards, our system will keep lagging behind the rest of the world. Perhaps the French have got this right, after all?!
running with bulls 