The NHS is in my view possibly one of the worst ways of giving the citizens or subjects of a nation comprehensive healthcare coverage. With the NHS, the inefficiencies, waste and lack of customer focus that characterises nationalised industries is compounded by the problems caused by politicisation of the service and political control and interference,

As I’ve stated before on here when it comes to the NHS, although I believe that providing a nation with healthcare coverage is generally a good thing, I’d much prefer some form of mixed system with private, charity and cooperative entities providing the healthcare with the government looking after the national insurance funding aspect of it and overseeing it by providing some degree of standards monitoring and accountability.

The NHS is bad at normal times with extensive waiting lists for treatment, lack of choice, scandals about poor service, misdiagnosis and in some cases abject cruelty by staff towards patients, but the Covid panic has made things infinitely worse. The by now in my opinion completely unnecessary Covid panic has caused the NHS to be even less patient focused and even more orientated towards acting in the interests of the staff rather than the customer than it was in the past. Here’s a few examples of NHS idiocy, incompetence and mismanagement from recent weeks.

First there’s my wife who has injured her knee. She needs to see a doctor and she’s been a taxpayer helping to fund the NHS all her working life. I ran her up to the doctors yesterday so she could make an appointment to see a doctor. She was not even allowed into the doctor’s surgery, she had to stand in the street and shout her personal and medical details through a ground floor window to the staff inside. She was told, no you can’t see a doctor but you can have a telephone appointment in a week.

Then there is a good friend of mine,whom I’d like readers to pray for. She has a leak of cerebrospinal fluid which the NHS misdiagnosed as a sinus problem and told her go away nothing to worry about. It’s only because she got a second private opinion that she paid for out her own money that the real reason for the fluid from the nose was discovered. She’s facing major surgery in a non NHS hospital to try to solve this problem a problem that should have been caught by the NHS.

A friend of my wife’s, a widow of 91, injured her leg. She telephoned her doctor asking for an appointment or preferably a visit from the doctor due to her age. The arrogant and uncaring state employee at the doctor’s surgery refused her reasonable request to be seen by a doctor and told her ‘use your smartphone to take a picture of the injury and send it it’. When the patient replied that not only did she not have a smartphone, didn’t know how to use one and was 91, the surgery employee just told her to find someone who can use a phone to take the picture.

Another person, a relative, received a letter about a mid life health check. He was happy about this as although a healthy manual worker it would help him get to grips with a few health niggles that he had. The health check for what it was worth consisted of some minimum wage health service drone reading a list of tick box questions to him. The call ended with the drone telling my relative ‘OK fine,see you in five years’.

Another person who I encountered online recently had a relative who was in dire need of physiotherapy. An appointment at long last came through. Yes you’ve guessed it, it was a telephone appointment, for physiotherapy, a speciality that almost certainly requires some hands on attention from a medical professional.

I’m not the only person who believes that the NHS is unfit for purpose and needs to be remade into something resembling the much more efficient and effective services which are a mixture of both public, charity and private providers. Britons are being incredibly badly served by a completely piss poor service that costs a truly enormous amount of taxpayers money. What’s even worse than the piss poor service, the arrogance of its staff, the misdiagnoses and the cruelty of the NHS system is that government and media tell the British subject that we should worship the NHS and that it is ‘the envy of the world’ even though it plainly is not. About the only positive thing I can think of to say about the NHS is that in Britain nobody goes bankrupt over medical bills which is what happens in the USA. However, this minor positive is not worth the price that Britons pay for having a health care system that is woefully unfit for purpose.

Still feel like clapping the NHS after reading this? I don’t. I want to see it torn down and replaced with something better, a healthcare entity with more choice for the patient and a system that doesn’t treat the patient like they are something akin to a dog turd on the pavement.