Reply To: NHS – will it survive?

[kaz]

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.

Quite. I actually have no problem paying for some things on the NHS, and being a 40% tax band payer I contribute far more than many people do

What I do object to is a percentage of that going to “shareholder value” – is the current government really naive enough to think that we believe it will be cheaper to deliver care privately, usually in the first wave of contracts it is more “cost effective” until the private companies “own” the value chain and then costs escallate and service declines – the gap between the two delivering “shareholder value”.

I used to work in the NHS – Reg Psych Nurse back in the 80’s. Things were tight back then too, but there was a level of pride in the system that isn’t there now. Unless you’ve actually worked in the NHS and been on the coalface you don’t really have a notion of what nurses do and face each day and what a 13 hour nightshift on an admission ward feels like on night 4.

When your alternative is a fiscally incontinent Momentum led Corbyn government, who will support unions striking over things like running trains with only a driver, there seems to be no viable alternative to keep the country running to produce the taxes to pay for my social conscience to be delivered.

Ah yes, I forgot you were one of the blinkered Corbyn haters who really genuinely believe that Austerity works and the Tory party is really out to deliver an NHS that is delivers to the people rather than their shareholding donors and supporting corporations.

The monetary system is broken, very seriously broken, but there is not a global visionary that can fix it