“It is health that is real wealth. And not pieces of gold and silver.” – Ghandi
We all know that the NHS had its funding severely cut during the Tory years of Austerity. We also know that NHS staff suffered seven years of having their wages frozen and then capped at 1%. Bursaries for trainee nurses were abolished, and all health students had to take out loans to fund their medical training.
“Britain’s National Health Service is in crisis, with sky-high and still-rising waiting lists and huge delays in emergency services. It’s the predictable result of over a decade of Tory-imposed austerity.” JACOBIN:01/11/23)
The British public are supposed to love the NHS yet we repeatedly vote for individuals and political parties that want to see its destruction. We cheered, we clapped, we banged saucepans every Thursday evening outside our doors in appreciation of the selfless work of all NHS staff during the pandemic, many of those health workers loosing their own lives in their attempt to save others.
Yet just a few years later more and more of us are turning to Reform UK whose policy it is to privatise health care provision. Reform UK's 2024 Manifesto called for tax relief of 20% for all private healthcare and insurance. In other words, Nigel Farage and Reform UK want the British taxpayer to subsidise those paying for private health care. Put crudely, under Reform UK the poor are expected to pay the medical bills of the wealthy.
Farage has also said he is open to the NHS being replaced by “an insurance-based model". We only have to look to America, which we know Farage often does, to see what an insurance based model of healthcare provision can lead too.
“America ranks worst in the world for health care – despite spending trillions" (Yahoo/finance: 02/10/24)
Not only have Reform UK and Nigel Farage proposed that the poor subsidise the private medical bills of the well-off, they are also proposing a health care system that has the worst of all possible outcomes – a system even more costly than the NHS yet delivering worse medical care.
The British public really must be careful of who they vote for if they want to save the NHS.
