Posted on 04/18/2005 2:26:35 PM PDT by Pokey78
In yesterday's Daily Telegraph, Paul Burstow, the Liberal Democrats' health spokesperson, was asked for his reaction to the latest survey on attitudes to the NHS. "These figures," he said, "show that what people want is to have control over their health and their health care. That means better information and opportunities to make healthy choices."
No, it doesn't. That second sentence is a lot of soothing somnolent buzz words - "opportunity", "choice" - but it bears no relation to the first. The reason people don't have "control" over their health care is because the government has control over it. If you had control over it, you'd have the hip operation on Thursday. But instead your hip operation's controlled by the state, so it's pencilled in for October 2008, if the hospital hasn't been consolidated into some new efficient centralised regional hip facility 150 miles away, in which case it will be February 2011.
There's no great mystery over this. "Waiting" is built into the concept of a government health service: As my own non-government doctor put it, making idle chit-chat as his fingers explored my fleshly delights, "When the government runs the system, every time you get operated on, it costs the government money.
So it's in their interest to restrict or delay your access. When you look at the overall budgets - salaries, buildings - it's not hard to understand that the level of service you provide to the patient is one of your few discretionary costs." The janitor and the janitorial services consolidation review consultant expect their cheques promptly on Friday; you're the one who can be postponed.
Scott, my neighbour in New Hampshire, ran for the state legislature last November and in the campaign was frequently asked what his health care plan was. "My health care plan is that you should pay for your own damn health care," he'd reply. Alas, this uncompassionate conservatism was a touch too strong meat even for the electors of a small-government state.
But he's not wrong - even if he should have opted for some heavily sedated Paul Burstowesque formulation like "My health care plan is that you should have better information and increased opportunities to make healthy choices about how to pay for your own damn health care."
The United Kingdom for which the NHS was created has all but ceased to exist: in 2005, the average citizen is more prosperous than his grandparents could have imagined.
Britons expect "control" over the cars they drive and the DVD players they buy and the internet porn sites they subscribe to, yet they live with a health system frozen in 1945. It's a curious inversion of priorities to demand "control" over peripheral leisure activities but to contract out the big life-changing stuff to the government.
Free citizens of advanced western democracies are increasingly the world's wrinkliest teenagers: the state makes the grown-up decisions and we spend our pocket money on our record collection. Hillaire Belloc, incidentally, foresaw this very clearly in his book The Servile State in 1912 - before teenagers or record collections had been invented.
The Conservative Party has no desire to go the way of my friend Scott, so the above points are not what they would regard as helpful at this stage in the campaign. But, on the other hand, he lost by a much narrower margin than the Tories will lose by on May 5. Hard truths are not easily accepted in the week before election day.
But the Tories have had eight years out of power and few of us could claim with a straight face that they'd used the time for intellectual renewal. Contemplating the latest half-decade extension in their exile, they still show little sign of original thinking on Britain's more intractable problems. Two words: "More police."
What kind of cockamamie slogan is that? Britain already has more coppers per capita on higher rates of pay and with more lavish equipment than America: the problem is not the number of police, but the number of them doing anything useful. Pathetic posturing pledges for "more police" means more hate-crimes managers, more transsexual community outreach coordinators, more "risk assessment" directors to determine how many hours after the bloodbath they should wait before it's safe to enter the picturesque village, and of course more money for whichever department of the Cambridgeshire constabulary was responsible for the free CDs they distributed to members of the local "travellers'" community entitled Del Gawers Pukker Cheerus, which is apparently Romany for "Give the police a chance".
The travellers may wish to give the police a chance; there's no reason anyone else should. If Labour's thinking on the NHS is unchanged from 1945, so too is Tory thinking on law enforcement.
Indeed, British health care and British law enforcement seem to be philosophically merging: both involve long periods of waiting, often in great physical pain. And, in fairness to the NHS, generally speaking you will eventually receive your artificial hip, which is more than you can say for your stolen jewellery or TV set. These days, the police are at least as vivid an emblem of wasteful bureaucratic statist Britain as the health service, and the Tories' inability to recognise PC Plod as Red Robbo in body armour reflects very poorly on them.
As the late Roger Miller so sagely observed: "England swings like a pendulum do, Bobbies on bicycles two by two."
The bobbies are no longer on bicycles, but when will England's pendulum swing? A 2004 GDP ranking survey of American states and EU members found only one European country made the Top 40 - Luxembourg.
The rest were all down at the bottom with Arkansas and Mississippi. Even if you believe in the utopian ideal of waiting five years for a routine surgery, even if you enjoy the egalitarian frisson of soaring property crime in even the most bucolic villages, even if you think Gordon Brown's 850,000 new "public sector" "jobs" is only a start and we need to treble it, the torpid bureaucratic paradise is unsustainable. One day the pendulum will swing, to the party that's put in the time laying out the hard truths. This time round, the Tory manifesto is a cop-out.
Insightful! (Library list)
If 90% of Brits have only experienced the NHS...how do you sell them on making a change?
Since the Second World War, the Tory's have come out of their "Me too" response to Labour only twice, with Antony Eden and Margaret Thatcher. Indeed, I suspect you could pretty well move that back to the First World War, and add Winston Churchill as the third exception.
Why would anyone vote for "Me too," when you can have the genuine article instead? And if you don't like the genuine article, you can stay home, because there's no real alternative?
Yeah but how bad will it have to get before they wake up and start the journey back to adulthood?
Steyn Ping
marking
BTTT
NHS= "No Hillarycare, Sir"
Told him it will have all the privacy, care, expertise, and quality of his pre-induction physical into the service.
It really is sad to see the UK in the grip of Socialism. Tony Blair was a stand up guy on Iraq, but the Labour Party has greatly damaged that fine country and our cousins across the pond are too indoctrinated to realize it.
Thank you !
Bingo. Scarey how many in this country don't get that.
The crisis in health care in the UK is due to fewer NHS doctors. Will they be able to force them into service?
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Is Steyn a FReeper??? |
Thanks for the ping, Pokey! Maybe he'll turn his laser eye on Canada's health system as well, before sHrillary starts to sell her wares again.
Throw in "control" over whether or not to kill their babies and they sound like Liberals everywhere.
Exactly right.
This guy should run for President!
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