The NHS – Expensive and Dangerous
Dr Vernon Coleman MB ChB DSc FRSA
When will people realise that the National Health Service does more harm than good?
British politicians (and much of the electorate) seem to regard the NHS as a sacred cow – a beast which must be fed and watered with whatever it needs. A few years ago the Government spent 23% of its money on the NHS. Today the NHS sucks up nearly 40% of the Government’s entire budget. Other departments (education, defence, the environment etc) have had to suffer savage cuts so that the NHS bureaucrats can be kept happy.
The NHS now has a bigger budget than many countries. And it employs more people than many EU countries have as citizens.
All this would be fine and dandy if the NHS provided value for money. But it doesn’t. The UK comes way down the list when its health care is measured against other countries in the world. We don’t prevent preventable deaths. We deal badly with cancer, heart disease and other major disorders. The NHS has waiting lists (which, as I have been pointing out for 50 years, are virtually unknown anywhere else in the world). The NHS wastes money in the billions; it employs far too many administrators; it saves money by putting patients into beds where the sheets haven’t been changed and it still has mixed sex wards. There is more thieving in the NHS than any other large organisation. The NHS is now one of the few organisations in the world that still relies on pagers and fax machines. NHS hospitals are so filthy that they are the world leaders in the incidence of antibiotic resistant killer bugs. Patients in the NHS are more likely to develop stomach bugs, or to die of infections they’ve caught in a hospital, than patients anywhere else. The food in NHS hospitals costs a fortune to produce but it is so unhealthy it is deadly. You’d better off eating from a hot dog stall than an NHS kitchen. As I have been pointing out for years the NHS is so expensive to run it would be cheaper to provide everyone in Britain will free, private health insurance and to provide private treatment for every patient who needs care. That’s how bad the NHS has become.
None of this will be news to readers of my books on health care. But it really is about time that the inadequacies of the NHS were recognised by more people. At the moment the NHS puts administrators first, medical staff second and patients a distant last.
If politicians don’t do something to control the NHS then the health service will bankrupt Britain. Politicians don’t seem to care about it killing patients. Maybe they’ll care about the money running out.
Copyright Vernon Coleman November 2018
Vernon Coleman’s bestselling health books include `Coleman’s Laws’, `How to Stop Your Doctor Killing You’ and `Doctors and Nurses Kill More People than Cancer’. All are available as ebooks on Amazon.
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