The National Health Service is cherished throughout the U.K. People from outside our country tend to look in with bemusement at what they may consider to be an almost religious devotion to free healthcare. Americans in particular look at universal healthcare with distrust, considering it to be somehow a part of some communistic threat to all they hold dear. Indeed, the current president, Donald Trump, was elected partly on a pledge to repeal Obamacare, which is the closest the USA has so far come to experiencing a socialised system of healthcare.
The NHS was created stage by stage with the Ruling Class resisting it at every step. The major leaps forward came with free hospital provision being afforded to military personnel wounded fighting to keep the capitalist parasites in power over the people as a whole. The carnage of two World Wars was the price in blood for the building of the Welfare State, with socialised healthcare forming a major part.
The NHS was not given to the people by a benevolent establishment; it was torn from them by a people who had been subjected to the most horrific suffering; it was a reluctant compromise by the Ruling Class to keep the people from revolting. By throwing a few easily afforded scraps from the table to a people who were so beaten down that they had become accustomed to living a life of hardship, the establishment was able to reap a fanfare of extreme gratitude from a people who could not see that they had a right to be treated as human beings, and that universal healthcare was but a part of a better world which was kept away from them by the people they were cheering.
The existence of the NHS is an affront to capitalism. The Ruling Class allowed it to be formed as a sticking plaster for an economic system in its death throes. The NHS has been under attack since its foundation, with the attacks increasing over time until it is now beginning to collapse.
The most common criticism of the NHS is that it is an economic blackhole, which no matter how much money is thrown at it, will never reach a point where it can balance the books. This criticism at a simplistic level is correct. However, what is omitted is any consideration of why the NHS wastes such a vast amount of money. When that is examined, it becomes clear that the Service is the victim of capitalist machinations and liberal obsessions, which together are tearing it apart.
The capitalist assault on the NHS is so obvious that it is only through the collaboration of the mass media that the assault is kept hidden.
In a Socialist Society, prices and wages are fixed. This basic action ensures that there is no such thing as inflation. The NHS operates within a wider capitalist reality, meaning that year on year costs increase, as medicines, wages, equipment and all manner of other costs rise. As long as capitalism exists inside the UK, this problem will also exist. The false solution of increasing the amount of money taken in taxes to fund the NHS, allows the capitalists to use statistical data to 'prove' that the Service is failing, and to blame its Socialist ethos for this problem.
The economic drain has reached critical point due to external influences exacerbating financial issues. These are not looked into deeply, for to do so would expose the deliberate abuse of the NHS by those who fund and direct it.
The NHS employs a vast number of people. Those at the bottom are generally paid a pittance, while those at the top receive incomes which are obscene. Directly aping the capitalist system itself, there is a management structure in which the lazy and overpaid bourgeoisie are set apart from the hardworking and cash-strapped Proletariat. This situation is greatly worsened by the use of agency staff, who at the bottom level receive such little money that they are barely able to afford to pay their rents, bills, taxes and basic living costs. The employment agencies suck money from the taxpayer, creaming off an indefensible percentage of the wages of the staff who keep the NHS running.
Government legislation protects the employment agencies, allowing them to hire and fire at will. Crippling anti-Union legislation keeps the full time staff in fear for their jobs, with job insecurity for all but the upper management being a key factor in allowing the anti-human employment practices to go unchallenged.
At the upper end of the scale, the bloated higher managers are paid disgustingly large salaries, which they receive regardless of their workload. We are told that upper management must be paid salaries which are in line with the private sector so that the best minds can be enticed to work for the public good. This is frankly bullshit. Capitalism is built of the need of people to stab each other in the back in order to rise to a position where they accumulate great wealth, while those who are less mercenary eek out a meagre existence. This thinking has no place in the NHS - in truth it has no place in a sane society, and to find it lauded in the NHS is disgusting.
The NHS hierarchical system has been twisted and distorted to ensure that whereas the Proletarian staff can be sacked with the flimsiest of excuses, the Bourgeois managers and directors are harder to get rid of, and when they are dismissed, are let go with golden handshakes of sums of money which are totally unjustifiable.
The NHS management system is set up to stop the incompetent being punished. A truly useless lower manager can be pushed higher and higher up the ranks, to become an absolutely pathetic upper manager, while those who are capable, efficient and good at their jobs at kept in place, barely progressing, if at all.
The government of the U.K. is pushed by those who control it, to privatise everything. The NHS has been divided into rival bodies which have to compete for resources. These bodies pull in different directions, and increase the drain on resources by duplicating staff - especially overpaid management - for no good reason. The lapdog media dutifully reports on this absurdity, albeit omitting to discuss the corruption which is the government interference behind it all. This is then used to justify introduce the private sector into the NHS via many points of entry, with a not-for-profit Service becoming a business, funded by taxpayers, with profits going into the coffers of greedy parasites. Richard Branson (the UK version of George Soros) has secured contracts to run Hospitals, with vast sums in kickbacks going to government people as a reward for putting profits before people.
Another factor which is wrecking the NHS is the spiralling cost of medicine. Pharmaceutical companies make drugs at very little cost, and then sell them at exorbitantly inflated prices. Quite often the drugs do not even work, and in all too many cases, they are harmful to patients. The drug companies have a vested interest in pushing their chemicals. If products which prevented ill health, were widely used, the pharmaceutical corporations would see their profits vastly cut. It is in their interests to keep us sick. A healthy patient does not consume expensive drugs. A healthy patient does not make profits for the chemists.
There are alternative remedies and therapies which the NHS is discouraged from allowing patients access to. A whole range of chemical treatments are ethically questionable, but are used routinely due to the subjugation of healthcare to profit-making.
In a Socialist society, all businesses, all amenities, all infrastructure is socialised. The NHS suffers greatly because it is at the 'mercy' of the private pharmaceutical companies. This issue requires the total socialisation of medicine. When treatment does not generate profits for anyone, there will be no incentive to produce treatments which do not help the patient. When medicines are produced and transferred to the healthcare providers at cost price, a key financial hole will be plugged. The only people who will lose out will be the capitalists who have made profits from medicines, some of which could not reasonably be referred to as such.
The waste of resources and money which has blighted the NHS is not the only aspect of its downfall. Liberal politics have played their part too. Employment quota systems which see people recruited with reference to factors which have no relevance on ability to do the job, have wreaked havoc on the NHS. Matters which are entirely private, such as sexuality, religious beliefs, coupled with other irrelevant factors such as ethnicity, disability status, age, gender, have become key factors in recruitment. When people are recruited to generate statistics pertaining to diversity, rather than according to ability, people who would be an asset to the NHS, and most importantly to the patients who literally put their lives in its hands, can be denied the possibility of employment due to less suitable people being short-listed. People should not be denied employment because of factors which are personal to them, but nor should they be able to use those factors as if they were some form of qualification.
The NHS has been ruined by successive governments who do the bidding of the Ruling Class and are purposefully undermining it as a healthcare provider. Quota employment systems and salary scales to mirror private corporations (salary scales note, not wage scales) have given the NHS a sick ethos of "from each according to identity, to each according to greed"
SWPE opposes all Identity Politics. We don't care what a person's sexual preference is, what his/her spiritual beliefs are, what his/her ancestry may be. We care about the quality of the individual and how he/she may contribute to the greater good of society in a way which is fulfilling and beneficial to all.
Identity Politics is a bane on society. Whether it is racial supremacists who see the world in terms of their skin colour, or people who make their sexual desires into an obsession which they mistakenly see as the most important aspect of their characters, we reject all of the Identity movements. Identity Politics is divisive. It creates false divisions, with people working against each other, to the detriment of society. It has become endemic in the NHS, and it has to be rooted out there as well as everywhere else.
Freedom dictates that people must have the freedom to be who they are, but this has been hijacked by liberal bigots and capitalist profiteers for purposes which are far from wholesome.
The current Transgender phenomenon is a part of the Identity warfare on humanity. Children are being made to feel that they are trapped in the wrong body, if they happen to enjoy playing with toys/clothes which are associated with the opposite sex. This is a tragedy for an increasing number of children and adults who are undergoing dangerous cosmetic surgery to align their external genital features with their emotions. These operations are being pushed politically, with operations relating to physical illness being pushed further down the queue in order to accommodate them. Financially it is a burden on the NHS which is adding to the undermining of the Service. More importantly, people are having care delayed or not receiving care at all - people are getting sicker, people are dying, to appease a liberal obsession and to make profits for capitalist filth which have no problem in making money from human misery - misery which is more often than not the result of political pressures to generate problems which have to be cured.
The pushers of expensive surgery should be seen as equals to the pushers of expensive drugs. They do so because there is profit to be made. They do not care about human suffering. They make money from suffering. They relish suffering.
The NHS is under attack. To save it requires a complete overhaul in thought. Throwing money at it is not a viable long term solution. It was set up as a sticking plaster for capitalism. It has the potential to be a first rate system in which those best suited to providing medical care can thrive, with the whole of society benefiting.
The NHS has to be overhauled with management structures streamlined, with those who are not suited to such work replaced by those who are, with all profit-making abolished, with the entire salary/wage differential ended. None of this can happen within the confines of a capitalist economy. To save and grow the NHS, the country has be be brought over to Socialism.
Capitalism is a disease which spreads disease. It is the mother and father of human misery. Socialism is the cure of the capitalist sickness. Socialism is the bringer of health and happiness to replace cruelty, sickness and misery.
The plight of the NHS is the plight of the nation. Capitalism is destroying everything. When Capitalism is destroyed, everything will be better, every thing will be possible.
No comments:
Post a Comment