Our health is NOT a 'political' issue!
I have often said this before, not least in recent years when many Americans (particularly) have begun asking on social media whether health care is better under Democratic or Republican regimes. It is not (or it should not be) a party political issue, it should be a matter solely of personal 'patient choice'.
The health treatment we are offered IS a political issue!
Most countries have a national health system which is largely, or significantly paid for through taxation. So the health treatment we are offered depends on three important political issues, namely:
- How healthcare is organised
- How much is spent on it, and
- What the money is spent on
These three matters are certainly based on political decisions. In Britain the huge NHS organisation is wholly paid for by government, to the tune of over £200 billion annually. The NHS accounts for a very large proportion of total resources spent on health care. So the British people, and indeed the citizens of most other countries because similar considerations apply, are highly dependent on political decisions made about health care provision.
So how is politics dealing with health services in Britain (and around other countries of the world)? Let's ask the three questions.
1. How healthcare is organised?
Whenever there are serious problem with NHS health provision the usual political response is to come up with 'solutions' that focus on how the organisation is structured. So, for example, when a new Tory government came into power in 2010 they created a new organisation, NHS England, which took over the control and direction of health care policy. It removed the NHS from direct ministerial control in the Department of Health. Similarly, when a new Labour government took office in 2024, it decided to change the organisational structure of the NHS - this time by closing down NHS England, and returning control of health policy and implementation to Ministers in the Department of Health!
Organisational restructuring has been a regular feature, particularly during times of serious crisis. And the NHS has been in ongoing crisis now for nearly 80 years! So reorganisation, restructuring, has become a regular feature, a veritable NHS Merry-Go-Round, for all this time!
2. How much money is being spent on the NHS?
The underfunding of the NHS has been another on-going debate throughout each and every year, and every General Election, of NHS history! It has become a symbol of political virility for political parties to claim that it would spend more on the NHS than their opponents. I have written about this ongoing phenomina in 2013, outlining how electoral success has primarily rested on the ability of political party's to convince the electorate that they would spend most on health care.
The result has been spiralling health care costs, with each new government to spend more to overcome the regular and ongoing NHS crises that have developed over the years.
3. What is the money being spent on?
The problem is that despite regular 're-organisations', and regular (often massive) increases in spending on health care provision, the NHS in Britain (and similarly health care organisations throughout the developed western world), continues to fall into ever repeating, ever deepening crises.
The political failure of health provision has been the abject failure of politicians to ask this important third question. This constitutes the most devastating political failure of the last century.
If re-organisation does not work; if pouring more and more money into something has little or no effect; and if the situation clearly gets worse over lengthy periods of time, the very first political instinct should be to ask the three questions:
- What are we investing in?
- Why are these investments not working?
- Should we not be investing in something different?
In the 80 year history of the NHS this has not happened. Nor has it happened anywhere else in the 'developed' western world. And what every single citizen, every taxpayer, should now be asking is why are our politicians are failing in the their primary duty: to ask questions, to investigate, to interrogate, to ensure that taxpayers money is being spent wisely, and to positive advantage.
If our armies were being defeated, our military ships sunk; if increasing numbers of people became destitute, dying of starvation on the streets; if our roads were regularly becoming unusable, our railways malfunctioning; if our telephone or television systems broke down; et al; we can be assured that all three of these political questions would be asked, and answers demanded.
In particular, these questions should be asked if alternative solutions were available, but excluded. Why, we should ask, is all our money being spent on one particular health system (pharmaceutical medicine) to the exclusion of alternatives? As far as health care is concerned, natural medical therapies, like homeopathy, naturopathy, herbalism, acupuncture, et al., have been effectively excluded from the NHS. They are no longer available to patients, even for to those who would want choose them. Why does 'patient choice' have no place within our NHS? Would the re-introduction of these therapies have more success in preventing the ongoing, ever burgeoning medical crises? Can studies be devised and conducted that might demonstrate whether this is so?
Instead, each year, £billions more are poured into the NHS, and the NHS spends it on the same thing - yet more drug-based medicine. We can all see the outcome for ourselves: one crisis following another, more demands for yet more £billions! This mean more people on more pharmaceutical drugs, and suffering not only from their (clearly demonstrated) ineffectiveness, but from their serious adverse reactions. Which inevitably means increasing levels of drug-induced chronic disease.
So if politicians are refusing to raise the questions, perhaps the electorate (you and me) should start asking politicians the same three questions.
- Why, with all the taxpayer money politicians are spending on our behalf, are we getting progressively sicker?
- Why is almost every chronic disease you might wish to mention now at running epidemic levels, far higher than it was in 1948 when 'free drugs' were first made available on the NHS? And why does chronic disease continue to rise?
- Why is it so hard to get a doctor's appointment? And why are waiting lists, throughout the NHS, so large, and still growing?
- Are pharmaceutical drug/vaccines really as "safe and effective" as we are being told by the pharmaceutical medical establishment? Why do politician never question this claim?
- Are drug/vaccine side effects more serious than doctors admit; and are pharmaceutical drugs, in large measure, part of the cause of chronic disease rising to epidemic levels?
- Why are pharmaceutical drugs and vaccines routinely approved by national drug regulators, only to be heavily restricted, then withdrawn and/or banned because of the patient harm they cause?
- And why have patients been allowed to take drugs and vaccines for many years/decades before they have been banned?
As Shakespeare says, "Something is rotten in the state of Denmark" but we need to recognise that this 'rottenness' extends throughout Europe, Britain, Canada, the USA - indeed, to wherever pharmaceutical medicine dominates health care provision.
Why should this be?
The pharmaceutical industry is the only one that politicians, throughout the democratic world, allow to have such a dominant, monopoly position within any of the major services they provide.
All these are serious political questions. So we need to ask our politicians one further question - just how much influence does the industry have on the healthcare policies they support and fund?
