The importance of our health system

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Subject: The importance of our health system

A dose of nasty tasting medicine works wonders. When I was small the medicine of first recourse, if I complained of feeling ill was a dose of "Fever cure " a Quine based fluid which tasted nasty. You had to be sure that you were ill, there was no avoiding the nasty taste and school wasn't all that bad after all.

And so it is with everyone, make them face the unimaginable, and they are forced to  consider their values and how important these values are or how much you are prepared to forgo something.

The crisis in the NHS has I believe been brought on by the government to test our collective metal. First it was an ongoing cut back on the funding as part of George Osborne's book balancing exercise, then the Jeremy Hunt
confrontation with the junior doctors and now the slanging off of the GP. It's as if the government were prepared to risk a breakdown of the medical system in order to create a privatised system more in tune with modern day capitalism where people are evaluated against the backdrop of a balance sheet. 

The effect of pushing people to the edge creates a current of energy in which people consider their role in the organisation and wishing to save it, combine creatively to find ways to make it better. There are always ways to improve any large organisation, especially one which has no overall CEO, no defined product range other than a wish to provide a service for sick people who are at their most vulnerable. 

The sheer volume of folk who pass through their doors with a range of critical urgency and an ill defined spectrum of outcomes make this a business like no other and therefore to use the tools of the balance sheet seems inappropriate to say the least.

A nation which values other people who are ill is a nation with compassion and given that our capacity to have morality and ethics as part of our make-up we should move heaven and earth to keep alive the Attlee governments awakening, after the trauma of Second World War, that we have to be more inclusive with our people and show them the compassion we expect from our own family. 

The stress on our hospitals and General Practitioners is a fundamental reflection on what we have allowed and contributed to within our society, worshipping the lowest price and therefore the lowest unit cost, loosing sight of the inherent value behind everything.

The political connivance between all parties to move from direct taxation and hide the cost of services in oblique ways, putting the cost on the consumer, knowing full well that this slight of hand removed the onerous weight of being taxed on the income you earned to what you spent, knowing full well that the expenditure of a family with children would absorb pro rata much more than taxing the income prior to the individual receiving it. The idea of increasing "income tax" to cover the cost of the NHS and hypothecate the tax so it can not be spent elsewhere, is the only solution in the long run but perhaps it is right that the system needs to be shocked into a mode of self analysis   otherwise the same old, same old continues and no matter how much is put in, still more will always be needed.

Our health is the most fundamental and important thing we have. We can cope with everything else.