Thinking of genuflecting towards what has become Britain’s new national religion the NHS? Well maybe you should think again before clapping or praising the NHS.

A recent report in The Times has discovered that the NHS is spending more money on giving out compensation to those parents whose children have died or been disabled due to NHS incompetence than they spend on the maternity services themselves.

The Times said:

The cost of compensating mothers and their families for harm caused by NHS maternity services is more than double what the health service spends on such care each year, analysis shows.

The total cost of harm from clinical negligence was £13.6 billion in the 2021-22 reporting year, according to an annual report from NHS Resolution, the arm of the Department of Health and Social Care that handles litigation. Sixty per cent of the cost of harm was for maternity claims, amounting to £8.2 billion for the year. NHS England spends £3 billion annually on maternity and neonatal services, a board paper published in March confirmed.

Just let that sink in for a moment. Britain’s health service is so bad, so woefully incompetent, that more money is spent on compensating those whose lives have been screwed up by the NHS maternity sector than it spends on maternity services themselves. How on earth can anybody defend such a crap healthcare system is beyond me. The only way that one can look at the NHS and see it as being fit for purpose is if one takes a quasi religious view of the NHS and refuse to see any criticism of it as valid and critics of the NHS as blasphemers.

The NHS is not ‘the envy of the world’, it’s Britain’s abiding shame.