”janep57 if you were paying for it you'd be paying a helluva lot more than your contributions have been. I have had thousands of pounds of treatments over the years which I would never of been able to afford.”
How on earth do you work that one out? If my house burns down tomorrow I will get a payout far more than I’ve ever paid in premiums because the claim is met from the premiums of all those whose houses don’t burn down. Similarly, your healthcare has been paid from the contributions of others who are less sick, not from money that was conjured out of thin air by the fairies. That’s how an insurance scheme works, whether it’s public or private.
My mother lives in a council flat, so if the plumbing breaks down the council send a plumber who is paid for out of the rent, but that doesn’t mean he has to be a council employee. I don’t see why the NHS can’t work the same way.
The problem with the NHS is not that they don’t do a good job most of the time, it’s the way they behave when things go wrong. Soon didn’t give examples, but I can. There are a handful of cases that illustrate the general problem quite well:
Kane Gorny
He’s the lad who died of thirst in Tooting Hospital because the nurses wouldn’t give him a drink. He called the police, but they turned them away at the door saying he was just a troublemaker, the same defence they used at the inquest. The real scandal here is that they knew that the public would let them get away with it.
The Websters
Are the couple whose son was taken for adoption because the NHS wrongly told social services that he was being abused. The child had scurvy because the GP had wrongly taken him off prescription soya milk. What’s revealing is the way the public reacted to this scandal, instead of placing the blame fairly and squarely with the NHS where it belonged, they were hurling abuse at the social services who had acted entirely properly. They were advised by the NHS that the child was being abused, so they removed him from the home.
Gerry Robinson
Who went to Rotherham to try and improve the running of the hospital. When he noticed that none of the theatres were being used on Friday afternoons, he found out that this was because the surgeons all go off playing golf. He never did manage to get them to work Friday afternoons; and when a follow-up program was made, they all turned up wearing T-shirts printed with a slogan gloating about it. I wonder if the public would put up with police or firemen bunking off work to play golf, and gloating on national TV.
Henry Crun
He had been complaining that something was wrong for ages, but was just patronised like a ‘steaming great hypochondriac’. Eventually he was taken to A&E and diagnosed with atrial fibrillation, but instead of accepting this, the NHS chose to repeatedly deny that they had ever seen anything wrong for several months. They even told him to his face that he had never been taken to A&E at all, and ignored the paperwork proving otherwise.
There’s a theme running through all this: the NHS are arrogant and unanswerable, but the Great British public just sit back and allow it. When the police smeared the Lawrence family it was a scandal, but when the NHS routinely smear their critics they get lauded at the Olympics.
, if not, surprisingly petty and childish , not really worthy of you.