The NHS is a "moral mistake" - Senior Establishment Figure

Charles Moore, former longstanding editor of the Daily Telegraph, has slammed the shambles that is the NHS, which Osborne should have brutally pruned in his budget yesterday, in place of further taxing the North Sea oil industry and one of our main hopes for the slim chance of an eventual economic recovery. Furthermore and even more critically at present, North Sea energy in a declining phase thus needs extra tax incentives as it provides a protection against the ever growing middle-east chaos. The oil companies will inevitably be forced to recoup the two billion pounds of extra costs raised by raising their prices to Brtitain's motorists, the UK market being a distinct tax area which includes UK Continental Shelf activities.

Looking to the disgraceful NHS, where waste, inefficiency and indolence thrive in an equally unsanitary environment, the latest report arriving in my immediate circle, for example, being that of a young mother suffering an infected wound some weeks after a caesarean section.

The report referred to in this post's headline, appeared in the Spectator Magazine on 19th February, overlooked on first reading.The statement is so significant, I quote it in full herewith, it is linked here:

The National Health Service has now lived almost long enough to test its claim of full treatment ‘from cradle to grave’. 

Certainly most of those now dying under its care have paid taxes for it throughout their working lives, in the name of this proposition. Now we hear from the Health Service Ombudsman, Ann Abraham, that it frequently neglects old people, often to the extent of killing them. Why does this surprise anyone? It is in the nature of a service which forbids genuine choice to patients that it will end up suiting the convenience of those who work in it rather than meeting the needs of the sick. Until money truly follows the patient, each old person walking into a hospital will be seen by those working in it as an additional burden, getting in the way of treating others. More than 60 years of state medicine have almost killed off the original Christian ‘Big Society’ motives behind nursing and replaced them with trade union ones. The wider culture increasingly sees ‘assisted’ dying as positively virtuous, and the contempt that this implies for the value of an old person’s life therefore spreads through the nursing profession. The old people now being killed by the NHS are of the generation which most fervently believed in it. Their hopes are being dashed. We shall never have humane health care in this country until we understand that the creation of the NHS — though not the subsidy of health care for the poor — was a moral mistake.

This blog editor has crusaded against the NHS since his first experience of it in the nineteen-fifties, read one recent quote here. It is refresshing to have such a senior former mainstream journalist join this cause, the essential point is still being missed however, this being, if normally healthy individuals cannot at the outset be made responsible for their own personal hygiene, physical health, fitness and well-being, why should we expect them to be responsible for all the other aspects of a normal human life?

More from this blog on the NHS is here.