Delivering his budget address yesterday, Chancellor Jeremy Hunt told the Commons that “the NHS is, rightly, the biggest reason most of us are proud to be British”. What extraordinary nonsense, says James Bartholomew in the Telegraph.
Anyone who has seriously studied the performance of the NHS knows otherwise. It is among the worst providers of healthcare in the advanced world. One of the key tests of performance is the proportion of people still alive five years after being diagnosed with cancer. The European rankings vary over time but consistently, for at least 25 years, those living in Britain have been more likely to die after diagnosis than those living in Belgium, France or other advanced European countries.
Professor Sikora once calculated how many people died here who would not have died in an average European country. The terrifying figure was 10,000 people in a single year.
Meanwhile, the waiting list for operations has now reached a staggering 7.6 million people. Doctors have been on strike which would have been unthinkable in pre-NHS days. People in many places can’t get to see their GP so they go to Accident and Emergency. But the waits in A&E are often horrendous. Nearly 400,000 people waited 24 hours or more in an emergency department in England in 2022-23.
There are many more such horrifying statistics about the NHS. It is absurd to be proud of it. Some people admire the ‘ideals’ of the NHS. But imagine that one of the premature and unnecessary deaths that take place here each year was your grandmother. Would the idea that the NHS ‘meant well’ be sufficient comfort for you?
The fact that the NHS still exists reveals that, as a country, we have shown moral cowardice – an unwillingness to admit that a failed system should be changed.
“European nations, along with Singapore and Australia, have better systems,” Bartholomew adds. “Most of them are based on social insurance and varied, smaller suppliers of healthcare. It is possible to make the change. The Netherlands did it. Why not us?”
Worth reading in full.
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