Another winter, another NHS crisis

According to Mrs May, there’s no crisis – there are only a series of challenges. According to Labour spokesmen, there’s indeed a crisis, and never mind semantic tricks.

Both are right: the current crisis gripping the NHS is indeed made up of many challenges.

One is that ambulance services can’t cope with the number of calls: a former paratrooper, 61, died from a heart attack yesterday because an ambulance took over 90 minutes to arrive. The NHS duly issued an apology to the family, and I’m sure the family accepted it graciously.

Patients already in hospitals typically find themselves on gurneys in corridors until they’re discharged. That happens quickly because, like beds, gurneys don’t grow on trees.

To ease that crisis – sorry, I mean to respond to that challenge – the NHS has cancelled all non-essential operations. That’s either a sound idea or a monstrous one, depending on the definition of ‘non-essential’ – and one suspects the NHS definition is rather broad.

Much of the pressure comes from the flu epidemic borrowed from Australia. Flu jabs administered by the NHS to wrinklies are proving useless. Perhaps they’re really meant as crypto-euthanasia, which would be consistent with the way socialist Leviathans tend to resolve crises and respond to challenges.

Indeed, NHS spokesmen routinely site ‘our aging population’ as an inordinate weight being placed on the frail shoulders of the NHS. That’s a problem for which euthanasia offers the most immediate solution, which had been known even before the arrival of the NHS.

The good socialist G.B. Shaw, for example, believed in involuntary euthanasia, otherwise known as mass murder. According to the writer, anyone (presumably other than himself) reaching 70 should justify his existence. Those who couldn’t do it to Shaw’s satisfaction would get the chop.

I don’t know what he meant by justification, but, at a guess, man being created in the image and likeness of God didn’t come into it. You may think I’m going off on a tangent, but today’s advocates of euthanasia do use the plight of the NHS as one of their arguments.

Euthanasia aside, arithmetic suggests that an aging population must stretch any health service. After all, the longer people live, the more of them become patients.

However, no spokesman on either side has so far expanded that irrefutable argument to include immigrants, of whom there are a better part of four million in London alone.

Surely this has to be a factor, now we’re talking numbers? Apparently not, and nor can it ever be: anyone who does such sums is a fascist, xenophobic, misogynist, racist, homophobic and socially unacceptable reactionary.

However, when it comes to NHS funding, neither side demurs from using numbers as the slings and arrows they fire at each other.

The NHS is underfunded! scream Labour chaps. We’re spending more on the NHS than ever before! respond their Tory counterparts. That’s not enough! counter the Labour spokesmen. We’d spend much more! Billions, trillions more! The NHS is already the biggest employer in Europe – we’ll make it the biggest in the world!

For once, I agree with Labour. The Tories aren’t spending enough – because there’s no such thing as enough. When a series of numbers is vectored towards infinity, a higher number always exists, and Labour are proving this maxim with unfettered brilliance.

We’re spending four billion more, say the Tories. We’d spend six billion more, reply their opponents. Well, we’ll see your six billion and raise you two. Oh yeah? We’ll see your eight and raise you three… This is the kind of poker in which no one ever calls – the chips keep piling up, but the game never ends.

Neither player will ever call by stating the truth: the NHS doesn’t work because it’s a giant socialist enterprise based on the unworkable and corrupt idea of universal equality. It doesn’t work for the same reason no giant socialist enterprise has ever worked.

Fans of the NHS will point out that it has been in existence for 70 years, and for the first 30 or so it worked well. Perhaps. Benign socialist projects usually take some time before their congenital defects come into play. But sooner or later they will.

Financial demands on medicine grow exponentially not just in absolute but also in relative terms. Some things, such as drugs, surgical and diagnostic techniques, and medical equipment, simply cost more in relation to income than they used to.

An organisation can only cope with such problems if it has a lot of flexibility and freedom of movement built in. This is precisely what any socialist project, and especially the NHS, lacks by definition. On the contrary, the structure steadily grows more rigid, unwieldy and top-heavy – all innate characteristics of socialism.

If in the past a hospital was run by its head doctor and matron, with a bookkeeper stuck into a dusty office somewhere in the basement, today’s NHS hospital boasts a regiment of useless, sponging bureaucrats.

Hospitals have to cut the number of beds to accommodate the six-figure salaries of all those facilitators of optimisation, optimisers of facilitation and directors of diversity. Socialist bureaucracies work primarily for the benefit of the bureaucrats – these are the spots that the NHS can’t change by its very nature.

The back-breaking efforts of its overworked doctors and nurses, no matter how heroic and self-sacrificial, will never be enough to plug the widening holes. That’s why so many frontline medical professionals leave the NHS and emigrate – they go to places where the socialist millstone will be removed from their necks, or at least lightened.

This is what no politicians will ever say. Government, which is to say socialist, propaganda over 70 years has turned the NHS into a sacred cow that can be milked but can’t be slaughtered. A politician who as much as hints at privatisation, even partial, will keep his job for only as long as it’ll take the media to report his gaffe.

And so it goes, from one crisis/challenge to another. These will never end – they’ll keep getting worse no matter how much money is thrown down the black hole.

At some point, a meaningful change will be forced on the NHS, which sooner or later happens to all socialist projects. They self-destruct, taking many innocent bystanders down with them.

There, I’ve already broken my New Year resolution not to play Cassandra. But this prediction isn’t so much guesswork as a dead certainty. Sorry about the pun.