NHS Crisis: Patients is a Virtue

Every investigation into Britain’s embattled National Health Service asks us individually how much we have ‘cost’ the service from the cradle to the grave situation it now finds itself in.

Nobody seems to find this odd.

I don’t see any shock horror probes into how much tourists are costing the travel industry. When a tour operator collapses it blames everything from the value of the zloty to acts of God, but I never yet heard one blame its customers.

Customers are as much the life-blood of the NHS as they are in any other enterprise. The responsibility of the health service is to deliver what it promised. Any failure to do that is not, by any stretch of the imagination,  the fault of those customers.

No enterprise could have been more successful in amassing a customer base. Who else started out offering magic chemical cures for everything? Who else was legally allowed to?

Stuffed surgeries the length and breadth of the country and mammoth hospitals buzzing with high-tech machinery are testaments to the popularity of the product.

The system should never have been a drain on anyone’s resources. It was never ‘free’ as is often suggested. It was financed by contributions taken from every employed person. In other words, it depended as much on ‘health insurance’ as any private scheme

.

It wasn’t smokers or people who eat junk food who placed an excessive burden upon the service. As a service it was constituted to treat all alike. If it didn’t do that, it became something else, some kind of branch of eugenics, in which the smokers who had worked and paid their dues all their lives were left to die on a gurney somewhere while their contributions were used to improve the quality of life of out of work actresses.

At the same time, the medico-pharmaceutical fraternity for whom the system was the real cash cow relentlessly promoted products and procedures that would attract more customers than the NHS could reasonably be expected to service - people with wants rather than needs.

The situation was further exacerbated by taking on legions of ‘managers’ who cost more money and delivered none of the services the punters needed or wanted.

Unlike the visionaries who imagined the whole thing into existence, successions of mediocrities, in parliament and within the edifice itself, tinkered and bodged and finally broke the golden thread between the vision and the reality.

The only people who really ‘got’ what a bonanza there was for the taking were the medical equipment suppliers and big Pharma.

Here was the single largest and ever-growing market for their regularly questionable, frequently useless, and all too commonly dangerous products. A single negotiating authority could provide the whole network to them and that authority had no commercial basis or interest in protecting the funds it was lavishing. As a result, it seems, its negotiators never pulled the drug barons aside and said, ‘I’m delivering you the means to supranational wealth beyond imagining; the biggest and fastest gravy train you could possibly conceive of; not just all these hospitals, but a direct line to brainwash all our doctors and students into the belief that what you cook up in your cauldrons is doing anybody any good - any chance of a bit of a discount?’

If there is a real challenge to the future of the NHS, it comes from a combination of lack of will, lack of vision, the lack of a contracted working population to pay the health insurance and the underlying corruption that has seen it transformed from a health service, serving its intended customers to a marketing wing of the ‘keep them sick and keep them coming’ pharmaceutical and medical equipment industries.

The visionaries who founded it didn’t see that one coming. It would never have occurred to them that the very patients it was designed for would, in some dystopic future, be held up as a justification for selling it out to the parasites who have sucked it dry.

BBC WILDLIFE MAKING A PIG'S EAR OUT OF PALEONTOLOGY

Tempus fugit, and not always in a good way.

When I wrote Blinded with Science, I thought most of the depths of scientific hogwash had been plumbed. But, until its present re-run on BBC2, I had been spared one of the most blatant packs of palaeontological porkies ever assembled for the bamboozlement of Big Science’s adoring and devout congregations: the excruciatingly idiotic Planet Dinosaur.

Like many other young folk, I was knee-high to a micropachycephalosaurus when I fell under the spell of the reptilian leviathans who allegedly ruled this planet in the Mesozoic era.

If you want to capture young minds and indoctrinate them into bogus dogma, dinosaurs are the way to go, and this thing goes there big time.

Using mediocre CGi animations and frequent repetitions of the word ‘incredible’, this infantile confection of grisly set-ups and speculation pits ever more ludicrously named reptilians against each other to the accompaniment of various grunts and squawks, while the voice-over merchant describes the action in the present tense to try and reinforce the delusion that it ever happened in the past.

In the only episode I ever want to have seen, new discoveries are purported to have strengthened the shaky, if not structurally unsafe, proposition that these superannuated lizards evolved into modern birds. If evolution in the Darwinian sense ever occurred at all, this transformation would require a staggering number of coordinated skeletal and muscular upheavals, during which the changeling would not be much good for anything other than fast food.

We are told that some of the newly-discovered fossil dinosaurs came complete with feathers. Birds have feathers, so that makes them part-bird, apparently. Tarantulas have hair, so I guess that makes them part-human.

The narration goes on to report that the favoured dinos used their bonus plumage for one of two reasons, the main one being to ‘keep warm’.

Unless some other scientific sleight of hand has deceived the eye, dinosaurs, if they were dinosaurs, as in reptiles, would have been cold-blooded - i.e., they would gain whatever heat they had from the environment. So there was no warm to ‘keep’. Feathers would have had the opposite effect, and might well have been useful rather in protecting the wearer from intense heat - dissipating it in the manner of modern day lizards, who hold one leg at a time in the air as a heat-exchanger in desert conditions.

The second reported use was to shake a tail feather at some cretacean cutie with a view to intimacy.

T-Rexes and allosauri must, we imagine, have got it together from time to time, but it’s not easy to picture quite that degree of delicacy playing a big part in their amorous encounters, especially as anything that stays still for any length of time on Planet D seems to become a ready meal for something bigger and even uglier.

The only real educational value of this digital débacle is to demonstrate the process of finding a few bits of bone (and the occasional feather), creating a fiction for it, assigning it a dog Graeco-Latin taxonomy based on a minor aspect of its appearance, and then insisting that it lives up to its new name in thought and deed, that constitutes the cutting edge of learnèd classification.

Otherwise, such cynical rubbish is not just doing prehistory a disservice; it has the more sinister purpose of trying to confer omniscience on a science in its infancy.

I watched to the end in the vain hope that a porkypigosaurus would come on and squawk: ‘Th-th-that’s all folks.’

From BLINDED WITH SCIENCE available from The Book Depository