So, the National Health Service (NHS) was 75 years old yesterday and as expected we got treated to the nausea inducing sight of the celebrations of this fact. We had the NHS flags being flown, the media puff pieces about the NHS and the higher levels of the political class attending church services to honour and praise the idol that the NHS has become.

But what are they celebrating? They are certainly not celebrating a properly run and managed healthcare system that provides timely and competent care for those who need to use it as the NHS has long since ceased to be such a system. The NHS is instead an utter mess where the quality of care you get is somewhat of a lottery depending on where you live or the attitudes of the staff. Some people may get excellent care from the NHS but there’s a whole lot of people who do not get excellent care and instead get treated like dirt. Those wanting investigations of potential health problems have to first get to see their General Practitioner in order to be referred to hospitals for tests and examinations and then they often have to wait for months and months for the actual tests to be carried out followed by months maybe years on a waiting list for actual treatment. The result of a system where approximately ten percent of the UK population is currently on a waiting list is that curable illnesses either become much more serious or sadly end up being terminal for the patient.

The NHS is not fit for purpose and has not been fit for purpose for decades. It’s not funding or a lack of it that makes the NHS such a disaster of a healthcare system, it’s the way that it is run and managed. You could fling the entire GDP of the United Kingdom at the NHS and it would still be shit because of the way it is run and the nature of those who run it.

Britain deserves better than the NHS. We deserve a comprehensive healthcare system that does not condemn people to death and misery or, as in the case of some relatives of mine, fear making complaints about the piss poor NHS for fear of losing whatever hard won healthcare that they have. We deserve better than a healthcare system which has to pay out over a billion pounds per year in compensation to those whom the NHS has harmed.

Don’t get me wrong, I’ve met some brilliant and compassionate NHS staff such as the practise nurse who calmed my anxious eight year old son down when he was being examined for a digestive problem. The issue is that such high quality staff are few and far between in the NHS. More often than not you will encounter staff who are rude, arrogant, incompetent or who practise medicine in a tick box manner ignoring those relatives and carers who know the patient and their medical history. My own mother was killed by the NHS because of this tick box medicine when she was given an antibiotic that the family knew was not suitable and would not work which meant that sepsis set in and it was too late to give the proper antibiotic that might have saved her.

I don’t love the NHS in fact I despise it. It’s piss poor when compared with other universal healthcare systems in other advanced countries yet the NHS tells itself and tells the rest of us that it is the best. The NHS is not the ‘envy of the world’ instead its a healthcare model that has not been copied by any advanced nation and for good reasons. One of them being that having a state run and state funded healthcare system creates not just a monstrously inefficient one but one where there are large elements of producer capture with the service being run for the benefit of staff rather than patients.

I believe that there should be universal healthcare for Britons and one that unlike the US system does not bankrupt the patient with medical bills, but there are better ways to achieve that than the NHS model. In Britain under the NHS although you might not go bankrupt paying medical bills the cost for Britain’s ‘free at the point of use’ system is that you might die before you actually get treated or suffer from some monstrous medical incompetence event. It’s possible to recover from bankruptcy but not from death by medical misadventure, incompetence or badly managed medical care.

I hate the NHS but I never used to until I and my family have had to use it. Having seen and experienced the ‘care’ dished out by the NHS and seen how the NHS has treated my friends and relatives over the years I find I cannot support it or want to see the current NHS model continue to exist. We Britons deserve a better healthcare system of a sort that other countries that have not chosen the NHS route have created.

Addendum

To those who still cling onto the false belief that all the NHS’s woes could be cured with more money from taxpayers then the adverts below for highly paid non-jobs should disabuse you of the idea that the NHS is underfunded. None of these positions are needed, none of them have any benefit to patients and the cost of these non-jobs comes from money that should be spent primarily on patient care.