Sacred Cow

No prizes for guessing what this refers to. No, not the BBC; that’s just a cow. I’m talking about the NHS. If it’s not the elderly being discharged prematurely from hospital, it’s bereaved parents being lied to, sepsis sufferers being told to take paracetamol, paperwork filed incorrectly leading to precipitous prognoses, or the vulnerable being butchered on the perverted altar of transgenderism.

Whatever happened to First, Do No Harm? The NHS mantra is now: First, Cover Our Arse; or even First, Woke Our Outcomes.

One of my regular readers shared his insightful take on NHS woes. In a socialist economy, the goal is that all should have what everyone else has.  In the Soviet Union, the state produced the Lada car that everyone should be able to afford.  Fine, but to do this it had to be cheap and therefore it was a lossmaker.  To prevent the state losing too much money, it limited the car’s supply, and people were put on a list of potential buyers, then they waited and waited and waited.......unless you bribed someone, a practise that lefties would have you believe is the preserve of capitalism.

Closer to home, we have the NHS providing care 'free at the point of delivery'.  Fine again, but it has become a financial burden to the state. So we now have longer and longer and longer waiting lists.........unless you bribe someone. This time it’s legal and it’s called paying for treatment in the private sector.

It’s the shortage economy, Stupid, as Bill Clinton might have said.

More specifically, it’s supply and demand, a market phenomenon from which no one can escape, a bit like a black hole. Soviets limited supply as a solution to their cost-problem. The NHS needs to either limit supply or demand or both in order to improve its functionality, which is a polite way of saying to get a grip.

Of course, people paying privately reduces demand on the NHS. Funnily enough, the Marxist mindset – rigid, rabid, rancorous – wags its finger at those who can ‘queue-jump’, because they say it disadvantages those who can’t. Actually, those left-behind on the NHS waiting lists are no worse off than if the ‘rich’ hadn’t queue-jumped; indeed, most of them would be better off because they’d move up the queue quicker, but lefties want a 100% egalitarian playing field in all aspects of everything which, as commonsense tells us, is impractical, unnatural and, in many ways, immoral.

Other ways to reduce demand include improving social care for the elderly to reduce bed-blocking. Ironically, while the elderly are in hospital, it’s at no cost to them, but many of them have to pay for at least some home care and nursing homes. So the principle of more people paying for more self-care services – for that is what they are – is not revolutionary.

As for limiting the supply side of things, it starts with acknowledging that no amount of money shovelled into the NHS would be sufficient to provide everyone with free healthcare, where everything is curable or preventable, and where we all live forever in perfect comfort. We have to stop kidding ourselves and start to make hard but sensible and affordable choices. For one thing, the NHS should be about health, not lifestyle choices. For example:

• Being able to have children is Mother Nature’s gift, not a right. If she’s not giving then she’ll have her reasons, and the NHS is wrong to try and outmanoeuvre her.

• Changing sex (a superficial exercise) is a misguided and dangerous lifestyle choice. The NHS should seek to diagnose and manage underlying causes of supposed gender dysphoria, often autism, and not proscribe poisonous puberty blockers nor enable self-harm.

• Cure the cancer, not the cosmetics. If reconstructions aren’t life-saving or pain-relieving, then the NHS should redirect its resources to curing more cancer cases more quickly.

• Provide palliative care when the only other possible outcome is a miracle or chronic debilitating disability.

Regardless of supply and demand pressures, should a service have to be provided, then the patient should cough up in full under the following circumstances:

• Architects of their own misfortunes – drunks, speeding drivers, butt-lift bimbos.

• Visiting foreign nationals, or the Border Agency / police are alerted.

Not an exhaustive list of ideas, and they need to be developed, caveated and mitigated to various degrees. No doubt some will dismiss the above suggestions as callous, but they’d be overlooking the fact that these are intended to relieve the suffering of the misdiagnosed and maltreated innocents without bankrupting the country or depleting the coffers of our armed forces and schools.

Unless and until someone comes up with alternative ideas that are at once more ‘palatable’, workable and affordable, then I’m sticking with my cunning plan of slaying the sacred cow.