Reply To: NHS – will it survive?

[kath]

My dad was self employed for most of his life, he was a builder. In the 70’s about a year before he died he realised my mum would be better off if he died is he was working for someone else. So he got himself a job with the council based in the local yard doing repairs on council houses.
He was asked by his colleagues not to work so fast, so in a morning after he left the yard he would sleep for an hour before he started work. He would arrive at the job with a work sheet, finish the job on the sheet, then ask if anything else needed fixing and do that as well. He was still doing more work than any one else. This was a man that was not really fit to work.
I grew up with a most of my family working for the coal board and some of the things they did to get out of working a full shift would make Dell Boy look like a saint.
The idea that just because a company is owned by a government it will be run more effectively and everyone will work together for the greater good, is unfortunately not based in reality. The tendency is for people to think they are owed a living and as they a shareholders they are only robbing themselves. Looking a projects that the governments have procured the fact that they can not even control budgets for large projects when they have no physical control over gives me no confidence in them running companies. The pension bill would increase because nearly all government workers have better wages than any one else, funny that.
The NHS is not free. That seems obvious but amazingly people take things from it because they do not see the financial consequences of taking things from it they do not need, or using staff as servants, ‘I’ve paid for this, I pay your wages’. The NHS has become the cure all for every single problem, no one wants to pay if they can get it free. People are like children wanting more, its free so why not have it.
As everything is now electronic it might be an idea to ‘bill’ people so they are aware how much their care would have cost if they had to pay.
I pay for dental treatment, I have a chequered past with NHS dentists. I get more time with a private dentist. People often say to me its expensive, but women will pay £80 to get their hair dyed and £35 every two weeks to get their nails gelled, which has no impact on their health. People do not seem to want to invest in their own health care and see it as something the government does and how little we have contributed to it we are entitled to take as much out as we can.