The NHS - Shitty, Expensive and Stupid

If you’re American, you might not know what the NHS is. Hopefully this will help……

British politicians consistently call the NHS “The envy of the world”. Perhaps they’ve never been to Canada, Australia, New Zealand, America or basically anywhere else vaguely civilised. Nobody envies the bonanza of ineptitude that is our health service, they think it’s crappy, because it is. For years now I’ve had to hear this inane bragging about how it’s a free health service for everybody and we should be proud of it. But hang on a minute, don’t they take a shit load of money out of my wages every month to pay for it?

How the fuck are they defining free? Do they mean I don’t pay when I actually get the treatment? Well colour me unimpressed, but that’s not fucking free, that’s what we call “Paying in Advance”. Calling something free doesn’t make it free, you can put a cat in the oven, that doesn’t make it a biscuit.

The NHS is paid for by National Insurance. National Insurance is the thing they sneakily put up at the same time as putting taxes down so they don’t actually take any less of your money. It’s a little bit like that trick Indiana Jones did at the beginning of Raiders of the Lost Ark with the weird gold thing and the bag of sand, except we don’t get the option of pitching a big rock at them when we notice they ripped us off.

People who earn money are forced to pay a percentage of their salary toward National Insurance, and it is supposed to contribute to state pensions and the NHS. Well when I retire I’m not getting a state pension, because I’ll have saved my own money and taken some responsibility for my own actions, I’ll have sorted my shit out and therefore wont be allowed to claim one. But I’m OK with it, we need to pay to look after the generation that went before us, and there are a lot of them, so I’ll take the hit on that one quietly. But the NHS is a pile of shit and I don’t want to pay for it. I have to pay for private healthcare, because I don’t want to have to wait 1 year for a brain scan if I’m getting severe head pain and passing out (this is the waiting time for an MRI if you go to your GP with these symptoms). So why the fuck should I have to pay for the NHS on top of that. Basically I’m forced to pay for one shit service that isn’t good enough to rely on, and another good one because if I need medical attention I’d sooner have it before I die.

People will bleat that poor people can’t afford private healthcare, so we need to support them, and that’s why the NHS is necessary. True at the beginning, stupid at the end. People who can’t afford private health insurance absolutely should still be entitled to a decent standard of healthcare regardless, agreed. But the NHS isn’t giving anyone a decent standard of healthcare, it’s the wrong way to do it.

This isn’t the wrong way to do it….

If you have car, you have to have insurance right. It’s the law. So that’s what the deal should be with health insurance. You just have to have it. Get rid of National Insurance (except whatever we need for pensions) and just tell everyone to sort it out themselves. The private health insurance companies will then have a shit load more custom, each different insurance group would try and get in on the action, competition would drive quality up and prices down, as has been the case throughout capitalist history.

If you can’t afford healthcare, and I mean legitimately can’t afford it, not you can’t afford it once you’ve spent a fortune on gold hoopy earrings and FCUK clothes, then it is paid for by the government, as part of your welfare.

The way it’s done at the moment isn’t even a little bit fair, and even if it was fair, it would still be shitty. Why should a guy earning £60,000 a year have to pay so much more for healthcare than a guy earning £20,000, that’s not right. He’s already paying 40% tax, can’t we give him just the tiniest break? Why should he be paying more for healthcare, especially seeing as you can bet your arse if he’s earning 60k he’s got himself private healthcare and wouldn’t touch an NHS hospital with stolen hands.

Kill the NHS, make private health insurance compulsory.

Simple. Effective. Better than the NHS. I should be prime minister.