Editorial in the current Autumn edition of the Salisbury Review
The NHS can be thought of as a bankrupt insurance company whose directors are resorting to criminal means to stay in business. Founded in 1948, it promised its customers free health care for life in return for obligatory premiums taken from taxes. It began with high hopes. The much-feared doctor’s bill became a thing of the past and for a while our health began slowly to improve, although initially this was due to rationing with its balanced diet, no sweets, concentrated orange juice, Virol and vaccines, rather than the NHS itself. The directors slept soundly in their beds.
It was a sleep that would not last. Medical advances mean we live far longer than Aneurin Bevan in his wildest dreams could ever have imagined. And a new type of customer has appeared, one who comes here to take from the NHS but give as little as possible back; not one of those well-publicised thieves, often from Nigeria, who fly into the country for treatment costing millions then leave without paying their bill, but a migrant who settles here permanently and later brings in his elderly relatives to take advantage of our ‘free’ NHS.
The latter, while paying nothing in the way of premiums and if not already ill, often become so when exposed to our western diet; succumbing to obesity, diabetes, heart disease and stroke at huge cost. On top of that, thanks to communication problems, the main cause of medical accidents, they are often fodder for litigation lawyers who so far from all cases, native and migrant, have run up a £60 billion bill, much of it in fees, from the NHS. Few medically injured patients get anything near what this disgusting profession takes in fees.
A private insurance company would turn such customers away or charge them hugely expensive premiums, the NHS cannot do that. It would be accused of that most fatal of crimes, ‘racism’, and as the original newcomers, however illegal, were welcomed by mainly Labour governments to replace the white working class Labour vote, it would be electoral suicide. It is of course morally reprehensible. Any private insurance company who took on non-paying customers to ensure they were voted in at the next ‘board meeting’ (general election) would leave their offices in handcuffs.
Instead it is the host population that has been paying for the non-payers – through delayed treatment, postponed operations, and second-rate social care.
We now face a crisis in social care. With the young unwilling to contribute a cent to it, some means has to be found to raise an extra £100,000 not only from our own pensioners, but those among the 500,000 migrants (the ones we know about) who have been arriving each year for the past two decades. The latest idea is an ISA ‘stood on its head’. From the age of 45 onwards taxpayers will save into it for their demented years and when they retire the government takes their savings but lets them off the tax. A large number of migrant elderly have no savings. Many native pensioners do.
There is of course always your house. The Conservatives have considered mortgaging part of its value to pay for your second childhood, and if the costs overrun its value it could always be sold after your death. A lot of elderly migrants have no property. Many native pensioners do.
The state is going to need the cash. Few people are willing to look after demented, incontinent, elderly patients. Instead our care homes rely on immigrant labour on minimum wages, often at a ratio of one care worker to ten beds. Care workers have no status, no union, no uniforms, no professional body, no training, nor anybody to complain to because the Care Quality Commission has no means of enforcing standards on care companies who might quit if criticised. The only solution is to import more low-skilled migrants who, in turn, will, like us, become elderly and demented. They will need homes. Yours?
There is an alternative. Mr Corbyn and his chancellor, Marxist fundamentalists who don’t believe in money, intend to cover the cost of national dementia by inflating the currency with £10 billions worth of worthless paper. At the next election the over 65 voter will therefore have a choice; write the government a virtual cheque for £100,000 or watch the value of the currency take a Venezuelan lurch downwards with a drastic effect on the national shopping basket.
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>The only solution is to import more low-skilled migrants who, in turn, will, like us, become elderly and demented.
Implicit in your terrifying prospect for UK pensioners is that mass immigration is a Ponzi scheme.
Apologies, Myles. I should have typed Myles’s.
Which leads me to ask: What about other great figures in history. Is it Dickens’s, Moses’s, Jesus’s? Yes, I know what H.W. Fowler had to say, but have we not moved on in our wonderful Americanophiliac day and age?
“Few people are willing to look after demented, incontinent, elderly patients.”
Quite so. But I did – as a callow fellow back in 1968-74 – Disimpactions, urethral catheterizations, bed baths… I’ve done hundreds and I don’t think I’ve ever felt more alive and loving than I was back then – much more so than I am now as one of Myle’s despised litigation lawyers…but when I retire next year, I’d hoped to return to my former life or something like it as an unpaid volunteer; and I would, except I won’t be allowed to without a 2 year community college diploma telling me how to stick my gloved finger in someone’s anus.
Hygiene is much more complex now than in 1968, I guess.
No excuse not to do it. If you live here then you need no qualifications to be a care worker. Just sign up at the Job Centre. Nursing has abandoned care home work in favour of management and sexy hospital work, whizzing computers and glittering machines, an abandonment similar to that met by Florence Nightingale. One of our writers is a care home worker. Read her experiences. https://www.salisburyreview.com/writer1/care.pdf