Each year the NHS budget is £69,700,000,000. That’s over £1,000 per person and over £3,000 per working person in the UK.
As a coeliac, I take probably all of that £1,000 in prescription gluten free food. A quick estimate suggests I remove from the NHS £450 per year on flour alone (approx £7 per box), but even I, an unusually heavy user for my age, do not take out my whole family’s £4,000 per year ‘contribution’. If everyone younger than me, and most people a good deal older than me are not using the £1,000 amount, I have to ask who is getting good value from the NHS? There will be the occasional person who takes out more than their £1,000 in a given year, and the still rarer person who costs the NHS more than that for longer or even the whole of their life, but the vast majority of us are not going to be using that much.
Now consider that the NHS went into the red this year, and that it isn’t the world’s best health service at any rate, and you have to ask yourself whether we need to look again at how the NHS is run. The NHS is a just and necessary thing, the US model of “can’t pay, can’t stay in hospital” is sick and inhumane - I cannot see a situation where I would call for its removal - but there must be something done about spiralling costs.
Much of the NHS spend must go on medication. Medicines have been designed by profit-making companies for a long time and, though I have no evidence, I am sure there is an incentive not to cure people, but to treat them. How much profit is there in a drug that is taken once and cures someone of AIDS for example? How much profit is there in a drug that keeps an AIDS sufferer alive for decades? This problem has resulted in few cures for well-known ailments and many more treatments that must be taken for a long time.
Profits in pharmaceutical businesses are not evil in and of themselves, but the pharmaceutical industry cannot and should not be relied upon to create the cures of tomorrow and progress medicine. Maybe the best medicine for the ailing health service is a cost reduction exercise in the NHS, coupled with reinvestment of the savings in medical research for cures?
The Spectator magazine carried an article in 2003, which attacked the attack on profits, which I agree with, but we should not expect or accept that pharmaceutical businesses have our best interests at heart.
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