The BBC is obsessive on the need to tell us how wonderful the NHS is as a health-care system. It does so as a not so subtle battering ram to force the Conservatives into wasting the same huge sums of OUR taxes on it as has Labour when they come to power. This is all about positioning for future years. You can understand why the BBC admires huge taxpayer funded monopolies. Anyway, I listened to this “debate” this morning on Today.
At first I thought it actually was going to be a real debate. Leading cancer specialist Karol Sikora suggest that the NHS is “doomed” and he was on to debate this with Dr Michael Dixon who is Chairman of the NHS alliance. However it turns out that Dr Sikora was simply pointing out that the demographics that support the funding of the NHS are unsustainable, a very fair point. Dr Dixon simply ignored this economic reality, as one would expect from an NHS apologist. Dr Sikora went on to praise much that is good in the NHS, including the “jewel in the crown” – the GP service. Sorry, but I don’t think the GP service is anything of the sort. If you are unlucky enough to need a GP after hours, at weekends, or on bank holidays you will find such reality rather different. Labour has put in place with GP’s perhaps the most anti-patient contract one could devise, though GP’s are richly rewarded! Why can’t the BBC allow someone on who believes that socialised healthcare provision is morally wrong, financially unaffordable and anachronistic in the 21st Century? Perhaps the analogy to State Broadcasting is too close for comfort?