“What’s funny about that is they assume my ambition is positional. They assume my ambition is a title or a seat. My ambition is way bigger than that. My ambition is to change this country. Presidents come and go, elected officials come and go, single payer healthcare is forever.”
Insomnia, eh?
Yeah, the NHS is horribly underfunded - but I think it’s still one of very few things the UK can still be proud of. I think most people wouldn’t mind paying a little more tax, if it were specifically ringfenced for the NHS. Yeah, I doubt it would be created today, and it’s constantly fighting creeping privatisation but it still has a great deal of public support. And desperate as services are these days, I’m still alive because of it.
Glad you’re still here with us. For a variety of reasons, I’m similar. The average person is pretty pro-NHS, but when it comes to politicians, there seems to be a lack of political will to change anything.
I think something that makes it harder is that it’s not just a case of funding (though that is also needed), but a restructuring to reverse some of the insidious privatisation and outsourcing that’s so prevalent these days. Additionally, there needs to be more money put into skilled administrators — whenever there’s talks about cutting the fat from the NHS, pointing the fingers at “unnecessary” administrative staff is an easy tactic, but a lack of skilled administrators means that medical staff have to spend more time filling in forms and chasing up referrals.
The greatest lie ever told about the NHS is that we need to pay more tax to fund it properly.
We don’t.
We need to unwind a web of outsourcing agreements that siphon money away from care provision and into the pockets of the 1%.
There’s enough money if you remove the grift
Edit typo
A while back, I spent a couple of weeks in hospital despite there being nothing medically wrong with me
My carer had died a few months prior, and social care services were fucking around a lot so I spent a long while without any daily living support at all, except the occasional friend travelling across the country to spend a weekend helping me. A friend who hadn’t heard from me for a while called emergency services, because they were worried I might have tried to kill myself, because the last thing they had heard from me was pretty concerning in that respect (I was in a bad place mental health wise).
When paramedics got there, they found me on the floor, having had a fall. I hadn’t even in a week, and was severely dehydrated. They took me to hospital, got me hydrated and stuff, but then I was in limbo for a while. They couldn’t discharge me, because it wasn’t safe to send me back home without care. But the various services that were meant to be supporting people like me just weren’t working. It was basically like the NHS and social care services being the meme with two versions of spiderman pointing to each other.
And so I took up a valuable hospital bed for multiple weeks, in a place that wasn’t well situated to even support me. It made me so angry because of the inefficiency of it all. It’s all so preventable, but there’s so much inefficiency.
And that’s not even counting all the x-rays I’ve had following a fall that I had because wheelchair services were fucking me around, so I had preventable falls that cost the NHS more money.
A decade or so ago my mum was in hospital for a couple of days. She had to go for a test and so missed her evening meal. So at around 7 or 8 one had to be brought to her. It was a small microwave meal for 1, still in its plastic microwave container. One of her nurses told her that the charge to the NHS for this single meal from the catering company was £45
Yep. I’m on the NDIS in Australia. You can get a quote for out of pocket for say 40$/hr or whatever. But as soon as companies hear NDIS, they charge the govt the max. It’s ridiculous.
Even though the NDIS funds only a small portion of the population, it costs MORE than Medicare which funds most of the country. Crazy shit