For many reasons, most notably because my family and friends have had seriously shit service from Britain’s National Health Service, I not only did not take part in the Stalinesque weekly clapathon for the NHS, but I also disparaged it and those moronic enough to take part in it. Why on earth should I applaud and idolise an NHS that killed close relatives and friends through incompetence and inflexibility and damaged and nearly crippled others? I’d be a complete idiot to clap the NHS. Applauding the NHS is like applauding the robber who is in the process of robbing you at knifepoint.

Needless to say I’m not going to be taking part in the latest bit of worthless virtue signalling that is planned in order to celebrate the 75^th anniversary of the creation of a state controlled healthcare system that is very much NOT the envy of the world. As I have said before, I will not bow down to the idol that has been made of the NHS.

The NHS is nothing to celebrate. It is a monstrous bureaucratic behemoth that dishes out a one size fits all healthcare service and a service delivery system that far from being admired and lauded by other nations, has never been completely replicated anywhere else.

I’m sick of the NHS and I’m sick of the lies that are told about healthcare in the UK. If you believe the media or the other cheerleaders for the NHS then you would have come away with the impression that Britons had no access to healthcare prior to 1948. But that it not the case. Yes there were private hospitals and doctors were self employed and which needed to be paid by the customer, but there were also a plethora of other hospitals run by local authorities, religious groups and charities. These entities served local communities, followers of particular faiths, the general public and those who followed specific professions, such as seafarers, who paid into a sick fund from their wages to give them healthcare. The claim that no Briton had access to to healthcare before the NHS, a claim which is trotted out regularly by the Left, is a lie.

When Britain started to repair itself and rebuild itself from the ashes of World War II, we could have created a healthcare system that was effective, humane, efficient and which treated its patients like customers who needed to be satisfied. We could have built a mixed healthcare system with funding from the State for those on low pay or state benefits such as France and Germany has. The path that France and Germany took has had the result that these nations now have some of the best healthcare systems in the world. Instead Britons, because of the Labour Party’s obsession in the 1940’s with state ownership of businesses and services, got the sclerotic, wasteful and sometimes completely inhumane state controlled NHS.

I do not believe that Britain should copy the American system where people regularly go bankrupt because they cannot pay medical bills, that is a system that has just as many faults, but different ones, as the NHS has. But other advanced nations seem to be able to provide their citizens with comprehensive healthcare coverage without financially bankrupting individual patients and without the moral bankruptcy that is a characteristic of the NHS. I’m sick of the NHS. I’m sick of seeing and hearing about people dying because of NHS incompetence or inflexibility. I’m sick of seeing people who, by sheer luck, get mostly good treatment from the NHS but feel that they are unable to complain about the bad aspects of it lest some faceless bureaucrat take away, with the stroke of a pen, that part of their healthcare they are happy with. I’ve known people, elderly people both black and white, who’ve paid into the NHS all their lives who have had the good fortune to have a good GP but fear losing access to that GP because of a fake ‘racism’ complaint should they complain about a minority healthcare worker who can’t even apply a lower leg dressing for an ulcerated limb properly.

I’ve come to the conclusion that the NHS has gone the way of so many other state run businesses and entities and does not take serving the customer or patient as its highest priority. Instead the NHS, like Britain’s state run schools and the former state run industries of the past like railways, steel and coal mining, seems to be primarily run for the benefit of those who work in them and who manage them.

Britons pay an enormous amount through their taxes for the National Health Service. The NHS’s budget for the 2018/2019 financial year, not including things like public health education etc, was £115 billion. We as a nation and people should be getting a world class healthcare system for that sort of money, instead Britons get a failed state experiment in healthcare provision. What’s worse than that, even worse than the crappy service that many Britons get from the NHS, is that we are told to applaud this mess and feel grateful for it.

I would prefer to see in place of the NHS, a mixed system with every hospital a private business or a charitable enterprise, just as other more efficient healthcare systems have. I’d like to see every legal British subject have a personal healthcare budget that they can spend in whatever hospital or whatever General Practitioner that they wish. I want to see Britons free to manage their own healthcare whilst not being subjected to the more negative aspects of fully private systems like that of the USA. I believe that the NHS can be replaced with something better and something that will be more flexible and which will treat the patients as customers and not nuisances but at the same time I don’t want to see any Briton without healthcare coverage. I truly believe that some form of personal healthcare budget funded by the government could do that.

I will not applaud the NHS. I will not and I cannot for to do so would be to applaud something that is plainly not worth applauding. We deserve better than the NHS we really do.