Prime Minister Boris Johnson has gushingly thanked the National Health Service (NHS) for having ‘saved’ his life.
Oh, dear.
This is going to backfire horribly.
Yes, of course, I understand why Boris is relieved to have survived his brush with death; yes, of course, it’s quite proper that he should wish to thank the doctors and nurses who cared for him. But why did he have to go and ruin it by attributing his happy outcome to Britain’s bloated, sclerotic, parasitical, inefficient, socialised healthcare system?
Boris has claimed “the NHS saved my life, no question”.
To appreciate the dishonesty — or, let’s be polite, naivety — of this statement, just ask yourself one question: “If the NHS didn’t exist, would Boris have died?”
The answer is almost certainly ‘No’. Every advanced economy has a healthcare system. There is little if any evidence to suggest that Britain’s socialistic, top-heavy, rationing model — devised immediately after the Second World War — leads to better outcomes than, say, Germany’s, or the U.S.’s, Hong Kong’s, or Singapore’s. In fact, in almost every case, patient outcomes in the UK are a lot worse.
In fact, if the NHS didn’t exist, it’s quite possible that Boris would never even have had to spend time in an intensive care unit.
That’s because a more advanced healthcare system, less hidebound by bureaucracy and lumpen public sector attitudes, would have been quicker to respond with up-to-the-minute treatment protocols.
I’m not the only one to have noticed. Boris Johnson’s half brother Max, a Hong Kong businessman, has described Boris’s treatment as a “shambles”.
Can you imagine the American medical system allowing President Trump’s health to decline so precipitously with coronavirus that for a period he was in danger of his life?
Of course, you can’t. There’s no doubt — not least because he himself has endorsed it — that Trump would be put on a protocol including the anti-malarial drug hydroxychloroquine, which numerous countries from the U.S. to South Korea are using successfully to treat COVID-19 patients.
Britain’s National Health Service, however, thinks it knows better. Though hydroxychloroquine is now being used experimentally in at least two hospitals as part of a trial, it is still not routinely available because of bureaucratic procedure.
The chief medical officer, Chris Whitty, has forbidden the use of drugs which haven’t already been tested in clinical trials — which means, basically, only oxygen or paracetamol. Like so many bureaucracies, the NHS appears to value procedure more highly than patient survival outcomes. It’s all very well, as dutiful NHS apparatchiks are wont to do, to drone on about ‘contraindications’ and about the importance of randomised clinical trials. But this is a pandemic — an anomaly and an emergency — and in such extraordinary times business as usual is far from ‘best practice’ but, potentially, a death sentence for patients denied treatment protocols they could have had if they were lucky enough to live in countries which didn’t have a sclerotic healthcare system devised by 1940s socialists whose role model was Stalin’s Soviet Union.
But the hydroxychloroquine issue is merely a symptom of a much bigger problem: the NHS is — and has been for years — a gaping, insatiable maw which gobbles up more and more taxpayers money to no obvious beneficial effect. It’s a broken model which favours crony capitalist parasites (like the vultures still feeding on the disastrous Private Finance Initiative contracts negotiated by the imbecilic Labour government) and which puts the interests of producers (anyone on the NHS gravy train) before those of the hapless schmucks — the patients — who depend on it for their survival.
According to any reasoned cost-benefit analysis, the NHS is a national disaster which ought to be scrapped and rebuilt from scratch.
There ought to be a major public enquiry into its many failings during this crisis. This would cover everything from its centralised bureaucracy and ineptitude which have hampered its ability to acquire sufficient protective clothing for staff to its inability to roll out sufficient testing kits.
Instead, it looks horribly as though when this business is over, the NHS will have been cemented in the British public’s imagination as the national religion which helped save us all from the 21st century’s answer to the Black Death.
It was already bad enough when, like some North Korean style personality cult, we were being urged to take to the streets in order to clap ‘our NHS’ (why the NHS? why not just the workers within the NHS?).
But Boris’s grovelling obeisance to the NHS blob, however sincerely meant, has made matters a whole heap worse.
When all this is over, it may well be that almost the only section of the UK economy still operational is the NHS — like some gigantic parasite that has taken over the host body.
As Charles Moore correctly — and bravely, given the NHS’s quasi-religious status — said:
As its name suggests, the National Health Service is there to serve the health of the nation. In this crisis, the roles have reversed — it is seen as the duty of the nation to serve the NHS. “Protect the NHS. Save lives,” says the slogan, in that rather surprising order. Children are made to recite it like a prayer. How are we to do this? We must help the NHS by avoiding hospitals and surgeries, we are told. The Government’s policy of lockdown is in significant part dictated by the demands not of patients, but of the NHS, and by its lack of adaptability and readiness.
Quite right. The NHS’s job ought to have one function and one function only: to save us when we are ill. Instead, by some bizarre inversion, we are now being forced to sacrifice everything that matters — our livelihoods, our economy, our way of life — in order to ensure the survival of this hideous parasite, which is no longer our humble servant but our overweening master.
I’m happy enough to clap for NHS workers. But I’ll never clap for this ugly, failed system.
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