Assemble yourselves and come, draw near together, Ye that are escaped of the nations; They have no knowledge that carry the wood of their graven image, And pray unto a god that cannot save.
Isaiah 45:20

The above Bibical passage is all about not worshiping idols. In the context of the time it was written, it was an exhortation to not follow cults based around worshiping statues. It was aimed at the scattered survivors of the Israelite people who had abandoned the god of their ancestors who brought them out of Egypt and who now followed foreign cults based around the worship of idols.

It seems to me to be an apt passage to quote in Britain today as the media and the government are trying to encourage the worship of an idol. But this particular idol is not one made of stone or wood or metal, but instead an ideological one in the form of the National Health Service.

People are being encouraged to put up posters saying ‘I love the NHS’ and to come outside and clap like performing seals for the NHS and to treat this organisation like it is some sort of national deity. Personally I find it disgusting. I find it disgusting not for any theological reasons, but because worship of the NHS is a wasteful and pointless activity primarily because the NHS is really not a worthy subject of public worship.

I refuse point blank to bow down to the new national deity of the NHS, even if it leads me into the sort of fire that King Nebuchadnezzar threw the Israelites Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego into for failing to bow to the Kings personal idol. I could not in all good conscience praise an organisation like the NHS.

How on earth could I praise an organisation that hastened the death of my mother via poor treatment and wrong drug prescription, put another relative suffering from liver cancer into a room filled with soiled and dirty linen and nearly crippled the mother of my child by the incompetent administration of an epidural. In addition to that my late father, who was going for a leg operation, found that the nurse had wrote up the notes specifying the wrong leg to be operated on. If this act of NHS incompetence had not been noticed then a healthy knee would have been operated on whilst a bad knee would have been left alone. As for the general standard of NHS staff some are excellent and skilled but there are others, well they are not worth worshiping either. For example: My late father in law whilst in hospital, had food and water placed out of his reach by NHS staff, whilst the ‘heroic’ nurses who we are being told today to laud, sat gossiping at the nurses station not noticing his distress. Also, my wife presented to her GP back in February with symptoms that are very similar to that of Covid19 yet the doctor dismissed her concerns about Covid as she didn’t fit the tick box profile of having traveled to Italy or China. The doctor ignored the fact that she’d traveled in early February on the London Underground which is where I believe she picked up the infection. She has now fully recovered but I am annoyed that the NHS could not comprehend that this was likely to be a community transmitted infection rather than an imported one because the protocol did not say to ask about movements in the UK when I believe that it should have done.

I say bollocks to this cult of the NHS. I refuse to worship at its altars, it’s not a deity, it’s a human institution and a pretty piss poor one at that. The experiences of NHS incompetence and callousness that I’ve listed above are those of just one person but if you dig around about you will find plenty of others who have had similar experiences of the NHS. You will find cases of wrong medication, wrong treatment plans, misdiagnosies, along with shocking tales of callousness and inhumanity from NHS staff. The National Health Service is not, as its worshipers like to claim, ‘the envy of the world’, it is in many areas seriously crap. It was crap before the current emergency, will probably be crap during it and will continue to be crap after the emergency has passed. Personally I dread to think just how much medical incompetence, stupidity and callousness is occurring in NHS hospitals at the moment for those patients who are not hospitalised for Chinese Covid19. There must be hundreds of patients who are hospitalised for heart problems, stroke or some other medical emergency who are not getting either the amount or the type of attention they require because NHS staff are so fully focussed on Covid19? If you’ve visited an NHS hospital then you will have probably realised that the nurses are not bustling around attending to the needs of patients but often elsewhere doing who knows what or dealing with the sclerotic bureaucracy that often takes priority over everything else in the NHS.

My view that the NHS is crap is not merely a subjective one, there have been studies that show that the NHS is really not as good as it could be. Mind you how good can a healthcare system be when there’s more administrators than doctors? One study from Bloomberg’s Health Efficiency Index published in 2018 shows that far from being the ‘envy of the world’ the NHS lies at position number 35 when it comes to health efficiency. Britain’s NHS efficiency is behind nations like Algeria, Mexico, Costa Rica and China. The Bloomberg report found that 16 other European nations were also found to be better than Britain’s NHS. An article on this subject on the Guido Fawkes site said that nations in the Asia-Pacific region including Australia lead the world in health efficiency.

Another study, the Global Burden of Diseases, Injuries and Risk Factors Study of 2016, didn’t laud the National Health Service either. This study found that the NHS was at 23^rd place and no longer ranked in the top 20 of the world’s health systems. The study which looked at 32 key disease and treatment indicators found that Britain was at the time behind nations such as South Korea and Greece. Yes the NHS did better than the USA which came in at 29^th place, but 23^rd place for a system that costs billions, is free at the point of use and is available to all regardless of income, is still pretty poor. The NHS worshipers like to tell the public that Britain’s NHS is better than the US system which it is, but not by much it needs to be said. In addition the NHS is burdened by many of the other problems that other nationalised industries suffer from such as inefficiency, political interference and corruption, useless levels of middle management and a failure to attend to customer’s needs.

Britain has a health system which is undoubtably rubbish but is one that we cannot opt out of paying for and are often trapped, because of the high cost of private care, in a situation where there is no choice for the patients. It’s the NHS or nothing, a healthcare ‘Hobsons Choice’ if you will. We also get a situation where we have a healthcare system that seems to be run for the benefit of the staff and the management and not the individual patient. Britain has a healthcare system that is run like the pre-privatisation British Telecom. This was an organisation that those who remember it will recall had long waits for phone installation, little choice in telephone equipment and even into the 1970s had the phenomena of ‘party lines’ where two neighbours had to share a phoneline because the infrastructure was not up to installing enough individual phone lines. There is sadly a lot in common between the NHS of today and the other inefficient and piss poor nationalised industries of the past.

I do believe that there is a role for state funded healthcare but funding is about as far as it should go. I do not believe that it is right for government to both fund healthcare and also run and administer it. That is the sort of system that invites conflicts of interest, political interference, undue secrecy and the treatment of patients not as individuals who require treatment tailored to their own medical circumstances, but as mere ‘units’. Whilst all healthcare systems have their problems, some of Britain’s healthcare system problems such as callous staff, sclerotic bureaucracy, arse covering by staff and incompetence, are either caused, amplified or made more serious by the fact that government both controls and funds healthcare. Far better in my opinion that everyone in the UK who is a British subject, regardless of income or circumstance, gets a personal healthcare budget that they can spend on whatever medical service they want whether that is General Practice or hospital based medicine. People should be able to add to this fund if they wish from their income but should be mostly paid for by the taxpayer. Get the government out of the business of running hospitals and give patients a choice of where to spend their healthcare money and to whether to be prudent or add to their personal budget or be imprudent and not. Get the doctors and the nursing staff and everyone else who works in healthcare to shift their loyalty to their customers, their patients and not to the government who manages them as is the case at present.

Healthcare is important and it is my belief that it is far too important to be left to government to run as badly as it does.

I will bow to the Eternal One, to my Monarch and to the Judges who dispense fair justice for they are worthy of respect. But, I will not bow to the idol set up by the cult of the NHS, I really will not. So don’t ask me to clap my hands for the NHS or put up posters saying ‘I love the NHS’ or anything like that for if you do, then you may get a short sharp lesson on the reality of the NHS and not the fantasy that the NHS cult types tend to believe.