Britain’s NHS debate is more like the dialogue of the deaf

    The controversy over the National Health Service (NHS), inspired by President Obama’s health reform attempts in the U.S., shows the infantilism of our political leaders, and gets us no closer to what we should be aiming for; a better way to deliver health care.

    It is impossible to have a rationale debate in Britain about health care. For some reason, many British people have allowed themselves to be brainwashed into thinking that the NHS is, or was, the envy of the world. This was never true. Sure it has one big advantage; it delivers services to everybody, regardless of income or status. But that’s it. It’s a classic Labour party idea; we get wonderful equality, but it’s the equality of crap for all.

    If you take the trouble to look at data published on comparative outcomes of health services, the NHS comes very close to the bottom in the civilised world. Look at cancer survival rates. Look at MRSA disease rates. Look at the National Institute for Clinical Excellence and its not so NICE arbitrary ways (You can only have this expensive drug to save your sight until you have lost the sight in one eye).

    The U.S. system by contrast is clearly the best in the world in terms of standards for those lucky enough to have health insurance, and that’s a hefty percentage of the population. The U.S. needs reform, to include the 40 odd million without insurance (about 250 million have it). So the trick for the Americans is first - don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater - don’t screw up the best system in the world when you reform it.

    As American politicians look around the world for ideas on how best to reform health care, they will quickly avert their eyes from the debacle that is the NHS. And yet it is impossible for any politician in Britain to stand up and say the simple truth. The NHS might have been a noble idea when it was first floated in the 1940s, but it has outlived its usefulness. (It wasn’t really a noble idea, it was a trick to make us all clients of the state, taking the gruel we were given and asking no questions, but all done with the politicians saying it was good for us, and fairer and equal etc).

    There are better ways to deliver healthcare. Look at the French and German systems for instance. These countries insist their citizens are insured. Everybody pays for what they use, then they claim it back on the insurance. There are safety nets for the poor, but there is no doubt that health outcomes in France and Germany are better than in Britain. There are no waiting lists, because the system reacts to demand for operations by using market mechanisms to move investment to where it is required. There are no wards. Try and explain to an American what a ward in a hospital is. You will get blank looks. Because we Brits have been forced to take second rate care for so long and it has been doled out like a charity, not something we’ve paid for (which of course we have), we meekly accept this degradation, which includes mixed wards too.

    So here we go again, with Dan Hannan’s remarks on American TV inspiring this ludicrous non-debate between the Tories and Labour. David Cameron knows as well as anybody that the centralised, wasteful, Stalinist NHS stinks. But he also knows that the Labour party is fiendishly clever at trashing the arguments of anybody seeking to improve health delivery by repeating over and over the holy mantra that the NHS is sacred, and can never be touched, and the Tories want to change this glorious system, which doesn’t come close to doing what it says on the tin.

    Cameron is so desperate not to rock the boat which seems certain to deliver him into Downing Street next year, that he criticises Hannan as an eccentric. As soon as the cry goes up about the NHS, the media, led by the state-financed BBC, can be relied on to fuel the ya-boo arguments about who loves the NHS most. Watching Andrew Lansley (Tory) and Andy Burnham (Labour) argue about how much they are devoted to this failed organisation is too contemptible, too depressing for words. They do think we are children.

    Any Questions on BBC Radio 4 on Friday night conspired to have a panel who all more or less said the NHS is the way to go, even though none of them were politicians. The BBC reports this argument as though it’s the paid PR man of the NHS. (Incidentally, the cretins who produce this programme, managed to invite an audience in Rye, deep in true blue Sussex, who remained silent when one panellist criticised hated, reviled Gordon Brown, but cheered communist union agitator Bob Crow to the rafters!)

    So the debate about health drones on pointlessly, with never a word about what is the best way to deliver health care. All we hear are silly claims that this party loves the NHS more, and thinks it is a national treasure. If Cameron was a Margaret Thatcher or a Norman Tebbit, one might hope that this professed love of the NHS was a smokescreen which when the election was over, might reveal a plan to design something more sensible and efficient for us Brits. (Just copy what the Germans and French do Dave, it’s not very difficult).

    I fear that the awful, glib Cameron believes what he says about the NHS, and so mediocrity will be the watchword in healthcare for us in Britain for the foreseeable future.

Right-to-die movement would soon become production line of death for the elderly

    The weekend media is full of talk about the right to die, with earnest pleas “to do something”. Tory MP Damian Green on Friday night’s Any Questions on Radio 4 tried to inject a note of caution into the arguments supplied by his fellow panellists, who seemed to be eager to change the law to make assisted suicide easier.

    Not for the first time do we see a policy developing which will haunt us in years to come. Green pointed out that if the law is changed to make suicide easier, one of the unintended consequences will be pressure on the aged, particularly those in care homes facing huge bills which eat away at the inheritance, to do the decent thing, take the pill, and die. The pressure will also be on those who feel that they are an encumbrance to their families and carers.

    If in the 1960s when abortion was legalised, we had been told that by 2009, there would be almost 200,000 abortions a year, I don’t think Parliament would have approved it. At the time, we were persuaded by those saying it would save a handful of desperate women from death at the hands of illegal, back-street abortions. I think that if we knew then what we know now – 200,000 abortion a year in Britain - we might have said that was a price worth paying for the sordid and corrupting production line of death which is the current abortion industry.

    We’ve also got the 1960s in general and David Steel in particular to thank for changing the law on homosexuality. If we had been told then that we would have homosexual marriage, homosexuals getting priority over normal couples for the adoption of children, and annual municipal sodomy celebrations courtesy of the ratepayers, maybe we would have designed it a little differently. Surely it would have been possible to legalise homosexual acts, with going the whole hog and promising it would treated as a different but equal lifestyle, with just as much validity as the heterosexual, otherwise known as normal, world. Bill Clinton said two things which stick in my mind during his two terms as president (apart from “it depends on what the meaning of “is” “is”, and “I never had sexual relations with that women”). One was “the era of big government is over” – totally wrong on that one Bill – and “don’t ask-don’t tell”. The latter was his decision to roll back on his plan to allow open homosexuality in the military. If instead of Gay Pride day, we had don’t ask and don’t tell, surely we might get back to a saner world where we kept our sexual preferences to ourselves.

    But I digress.

    The Dignity in Death movement is trying to railroad us into changing a situation which might be unsatisfactory theoretically, but works as well as can be expected in practise. Let’s face it, nobody yet has been prosecuted for accompanying some poor unfortunate to the Dignitas clinic in Zurich. We also know that doctors in this country have put the dying out of their misery for centuries. I suppose a pedant would call this murder, but this mercy killing happens all the time. If Parliament tries to formalise this, it will create awful unintended consequences. The possibility that poor Debbie Purdy’s husband might be prosecuted for aiding and abetting suicide is a small price to pay for the unintended production line of the elderly being pushed into premature death that any attempt to rationalise the law will mean.

Labour deliberately destroys opportunity for the poor, then pretends to wonder why

    The bare-faced chutzpah of Alan Milburn was matched only by the incompetence of the BBC interviewer.

    Former Labour Health Minister Milburn was blathering on about how the gap between rich and poor in Britain had widened not narrowed. He had authored a report for Prime Minister Gordon Brown which found that opportunities for the poor had worsened to the point where the middle classes were increasingly dominating jobs in the professions like doctors, lawyers and business.

    Something must be done, said Milburn, to stop this outrage, and BBC Radio 4 Today Programme interviewer Sarah Montague just took all this at face value. She asked respectful questions about how this might be done, but ignored the bleeding obvious.

    The questions should have gone something like this.

    “Surely, if this scenario is true, this is the result of 12 years of Labour government is it not? If the system is failing, surely it is down to you, and all you can suggest is a repeat of these failed policies? Grammar schools might have been brutal in weeding out the bright from the dumb, but at least this meant that the talented poor were able to win a world class education. Surely, instead of cutting off this escape route for the poor it would have been better to increase the number of grammar schools and raise standards in the rest, not dumb them down for all as the Labour party insists on doing?”

    “But it is true, isn’t it Mr Milburn, that all this talk in the Labour Party about equality simply means forcing everyone down to the lowest common denominator until we all receive equally crap education or health care or whatever. Isn’t it true that instead of the improvements in education you claim, the Labour party has presided over a shameful trashing of exam standards which is acknowledged by experts not in the pay of your failed government?”

    “Is it not a surprise that the poor are being excluded from higher education if you introduce huge charges which mean that any one graduating without their own family funds to pay the bills will face working life with a massive debt mountain to pay off? Has this helped to persuade the poor into higher education?”

    “And then you insult us with the final, demented idea. You patronise the poor by forcing universities to lower their standards, rather than seeking to improve education from the ground up.”

    I don’t know why Ms Montague didn’t attack Milburn for his bare-faced effrontery. Sadly, there are only two reasons that I can think of. She was too dumb to ask them. Or, as a card-carrying leftie, she was too corrupt to ask.

    It was a shame that she couldn’t have taken a leaf out of Kirsty Wark of NewsNight’s book. She interviewed former Labour cabinet minister James Purnell after he had addressed some back street meeting of an obscure leftie organisation where he talked about his infantile vision of a left-of-centre future. (As if he and his colleagues hadn’t done enough damage in their 12 year tenure, they still want to impose their daft, failed socialism on us). Purnell tried to insist that Wark question him about this, as if his failed, childish philosophy could be of any interest to the NewsNight audience. Instead she relentless badgered him on the reasons for his resignation last month, when he thought he was leading the revolt against Gordon Brown, only to find when he turned around to greet his fellow revolutionaries that David Miliband and the rest had chickened out.

    Getting back to education and Milburn; isn’t it tragic that with Labour’s failed policies harming the very people it exists to help, the Tories have also dumped the grammar school route (that’s why I resigned from the party). Who is one to vote for at the next general election? Maybe the only solution is grab the pitchforks and march on Westminster.