Patients in NHS hospitals are 44% more likely to die than in their US counterparts – and five times more likely to die from pneumonia.
Overall, our hospital death rates are among the West’s highest, 22% higher than the average in the seven countries investigated by Prof. Brian Jarman, and 58% higher than in the best of them.
“I expected us to do well and was very surprised we didn’t do well – but there is no means of denying the results as they are absolutely clear,’ says Prof. Jarman.
What’s really surprising is his surprise. The NHS is a Leviathan born to an ideology, not inspired by common sense. As such, its failure is not just lamentable but predictable.
In commenting on these findings, Sir Bruce Keogh, medical director of the NHS, demonstrated both a surfeit of ideology and a dearth of common sense: “The fact is we have a health service that is admired around the world, founded on the cradle to grave principle. But the other fact is we still have too many patients dying in our hospitals when their relatives were expecting them to come home.”
So what exactly do people around the world admire, Sir Bruce? Too many patients dying? Some of the lowest cancer survival rates in the West? Overloaded emergency services?
If this were true, all those Johnny Foreigners would be falling over themselves to emulate our stellar achievement – yet they don’t. Britain proudly and ill-advisedly remains the only Western country with fully nationalised healthcare.
However, we ought to be grateful to Sir Bruce for his self-refuting comment. For he unwittingly hinted at the real problem of the NHS: the principle on which it’s founded.
He called it ‘cradle to grave’, but that’s not the principle, it’s an implementation guide. The principle is post-Enlightenment egalitarianism, the pernicious tenet that, perhaps more than any other, goes against the grain of human nature.
First enunciated in a secular context by the American Declaration of Independence, this idea has been corrupting Western societies ever since. And because it’s false it has to be shrouded in a tissue of lies. The universal admiration for the NHS falls into that category, but it’s comparatively innocuous.
The most emetic lie is equating atheist egalitarianism with the Christian notion of equality before God. Aristotle identified this problem before the Incarnation: democracy, he said, arises when people think that if they are equal in one respect, they are equal in all.
With admirable sleight of hand, the modern state picked up the mantle of Christian equality before God and squeezed its own bulk into it. Alas, the garment turned out to be a straitjacket.
As the NHS demonstrates, equal is the enemy of good – it’s only at the lowest common denominator that any equalisation is possible. But the lie persists, and the Leviathan’s minders keep insisting on its charitable nature.
Many draw a parallel between the welfare state, the NHS in particular, and Christian charity. In fact, they are more nearly opposite than alike.
Charity, without which according to St Paul we have nothing, was so much more than a system of financing social services. It was understood to elevate spiritually both the donor (especially an anonymous one) and the recipient – the former because he follows the commandment of loving his neighbour, the latter because in asking for help he displays humility.
Giant welfare projects, such as the NHS, have exactly the opposite effect. They corrupt both the state (the donor) and the populace (the recipient).
The state uses such Leviathans to increase its own power over the individual – essentially politicians buy their votes with our money. The people lose any sense of responsibility for their own wellbeing and treat handouts as an entitlement.
As is inevitable with all such projects, eventually they achieve goals opposite to those intended or even proclaimed. Rather than closing social and economic gaps among people, they widen them.
Comprehensive education, animated by the same egalitarian impulse as the NHS, has removed the social hoist of grammar school from the less well-off. Rather than eliminating privilege, this enshrined it forever. Since the advent of redistributive egalitarianism in the economy, the income gap between the top and the bottom has grown wider by an order of magnitude.
The NHS has had exactly the same stratifying effect. Rather than submitting themselves to the death traps of NHS hospitals, those who can afford it – and increasingly many who can’t – buy private insurance. BUPA thrives while the NHS languishes.
In common with all giant state enterprises, the NHS is committed, in deed if not word, to serving itself rather than patients. Frontline medical professionals and hospital beds are getting fewer, while administrative staffs are ballooning.
Doctors and nurses are being replaced by directors of diversity, facilitators of optimisation and optimisers of facilitation. For example, a Birmingham hospital recently cut the number of beds for lack of funds. At the same time they appointed, at a cost of £100,000 a year, a Director of Diversity who immediately began to issue illiterate circulars.
All this is accompanied by dark hints that before the arrival of the NHS people had been dying in the streets like stray dogs. In fact, more hospitals were built in the 1930s (hardly the most prosperous decade in British history) than in the 63 years of the NHS.
For an institution to be admired, Sir Bruce, it has to be admirable. The NHS isn’t.