NHS Free Healthcare - A Vision Betrayed

georgemason (40)in #politics • 7 years ago (edited)

When the NHS was conceived in the mind of the radical thinkers who envisioned a free health system for everyone, in there minds they could not have imagined a day when it stood in the ruin that it was in right now, they have all been betrayed.

All across the UK the National Health Service is a shadow of what it once was, every day you can read stories about mismanagement, waiting lists and tragic examples of negligence that has lead to people dying because of underfunding or bureaucratic incompetence. Most people will know the battle you have to go through if you try to get a doctors appointment and find yourself unable to do so.

(The fantastic visionary Nye Bevan, the architect of the original public health service.)

My own personal experience of the NHS has been fairly horrendous over the years. Firstly I have suffered from severe mental health issues for the past 26 years, the NHS support for me with these issues has been pathetic.
My life has been put on hold consistently by a system that clearly does not care whether or not I live or die.

When I have been in the most desperate of emotional states I have faced an endless wall of bureaucracy. One the past two years I have developed a range of physical illnesses that the NHS has been unable and unwilling to treat, often they have not even recognised them as actual health related issues, and I do believe it has only bee through my own courage and personal strength that I am still alive today, seeking real answers to my problems through nutrition and supplementation I believe I have extended my life where the NHS would have left me for dead.

I have sat in the emergency waiting rooms at 4 am and had doctors turn me away, refusing to examine me when I am getting severe chest pains, what kind of system is this when a doctor would do such a thing? The quality of my life over 26 years has gradually diminished and the system that is supposed to protect me has sat idly by and watch me fall apart and done nothing to help me.

I have felt like a number, not a person, a sheet of paper not a human, I do not trust them now, I know that my health is in my hands, if I am ever to get better it will be down to myself to find a way. What kind of system is that?
Why have I had to spend hours researching health issues online in some kind of attempt to cure myself?
This is clearly not how things should be.

Objectively, we need to look at the fact that in many countries in the world there is a distinct lack of free healthcare or at worst care scenario no health care system at all, so in this sense we are repeatedly fed propaganda that we must be grateful for our system as we have it better than others, this is not the vision of the founders of the NHS, they wanted it to be the best system possible and not let people down as it is currently doing.

The other main argument that is used consistently is that the NHS is free, so you cannot be too picky about what you are getting for free, the actual reality is that the NHS is far from being free, we all pay for it through general taxation, we are all state based customers of a nationalised industry, and even although we pay for all of it we seem to have little say or control over how the system works and the quality of care we receive, we are instead told by faceless politicians to be grateful for what we have.

I have also noticed the many people can get highly defensive when you starting criticising the NHS, they will immediately assume that if you are critical of the system that you want it to be privatised or shut down, this does not have to be the case, you can be highly critical of something that you believe in if it is betraying its founding principles, Nye Bevan himself the architect of the NHS was highly critical to the system on a number of occasions where he stated himself that he felt its founding principles had been betrayed and was not the system that it was supposed to be.

We are told endlessly that we have the greatest service in the world and that we should tip our hats and have nothing but gratitude for what we get. This is another example of the expectation for us all to accept servitude to our masters.
The radical thinkers who setup the system originally were not people who blindly accepted what they were given, they massively challenged authority and I do believe if those thinkers were alive today they would challenge what the health service has become and want it be re-born in its original ideology.

The indisputable fact is that we all over the world have a HUMAN RIGHT to free and excellent quality healthcare, those who seek to destroy this right or deny it from us in the first place are those in the world who seek to keep the human race as nothing but slaves.

Our free public health system is in a horrific mess, but no this does not mean it should be abolished, it means it needs to be rethought, the principle vision of what public healthcare should be needs to be re-established from the beginning.

Very often the problem is that we have a duality of two systems that we are given the options for, either we have private companies running things or we have state based control, neither of these options are the best for the people, what we need is true people control across the board within healthcare and other industries, perhaps co-operative ownership.

The illusion that we have been fed over generations that people ownership is the same as state control is one of the biggest cons we have ever been sold, ask yourself a question, name me one time that the government or private industry has ever had your best interests at heart? Just one time.

Perhaps we should consider something truly radical, perhaps our health system should be run by us, for us, free at the point of use, not controlled by private industry and not controlled by government either, we need a system that works for us, that is truly owned by us, that is run by medical professionals not faceless government or private suits.

Until we get this system, how many more times are we going to read stories of children dying because a GP refuses to treat them if they are late for an appointment, dying cancer victims having to fight in the high court for medication, people dying on waiting lists whilst waiting for operations or emergency callouts taking too long resulting in deaths that could have been treated.

This is just not good enough, it is time we DEMAND a world class system GLOBALLY.

Free at the point of use.

Controlled by the people, designed for the people.