Joel -
Don't get me started on the NHS. Of course the Tories are predisposed
towards selling things off and bringing in more and more private
provision in the interests of "efficiency" and "introducing competition
into the healthcare market" - they think that privatisation and the
competition are the answers to everything, basically - and they're
particularly keen on the idea that a lot of healthcare problems can be
solved by introducing lots and lots of extra screening and
vaccination/medication programmes, because screening can be done by lots
of non-NHS agencies (such as pharmacies) and vaccination/medication
programmes put vast amounts of money in the pockets of their chums in
the pharmaceuticals industry. (As an aside, it's quite comical to see
how desperate both the Government and the pharmaceuticals industry are
to find some evidence that "vaping" is bad for your health, since at the
moment it's starting to look like a far more effective way to give up
smoking than any tablet or nicotine patch the drugs industry has managed
to come up with, which means that a huge loss of profits is on the
cards.) However, the direction of travel has been the same under both
the Tories and Labour - the pace of change may be different, and so may
the way it's dressed up, but basically they both perceive the problem in
the same terms and seem to be looking at the same limited range of
solutions. Keep the punters out of hospital at any cost - dismantle the
hospitals and move care out of the hospitals into small clinics, GPs'
surgeries and the wider care community as much as you can.
As someone who works in the NHS, the depressing thing is that once every
few years we get the "biggest reform of the NHS for a generation", which
means a dramatic rebuilding exercise and a period of exhausting chaos
and uncertainty; and when we start to emerge from the other end of the
process and things begin to settle down a bit (which is where we are
now) it's only to discover than none of the savings the reorganisation
was supposed to deliver have actually materialised, the projected
overspend is still pretty much the same as it was before, and therefore
the arseholes in Government and the Department of Health are starting to
eye up yet another huge smash-and-rebuild exercise.
Grrr....
- Edward
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