Is the NHS overfunded?

The NHS spends money like a lottery winner having drunk their way out of a champagne jacuzzi.

It’s hard to know exactly where to begin with the NHS. The national health service demanded that we lockdown society and the economy, while enjoying pots and pans being beaten in sky-bound, virtue-signalling, toe-curling-cringe sacrifice to its very existence, as though bestowed upon us by the gods, rather than via godly proportions of tax revenue. It was the same NHS that pivoted itself into the national covid service as effectively as sandwich bars supplying home-schooling kits or fold your own fajita kits (before they failed and sank, taking down decades of familial entrepreneurship). 

In its latest attempt at burning money, the NHS has spent nearly £65 million to ensure hundreds of ambulances align with London Mayor Sadiq Khan’s ULEZ scheme. Each vehicle costs £140,000 to replace. The Southeast Coast Ambulance Service must replace 279 vehicles, while the London Ambulance Service says 255 vehicles need replacing. That’s quite a scrap heap of fully functioning ambulances now obsolete thanks to a mayor pumped on dictator strength globalist kool aid and his C40 Cities embossed stationary. It’s hard to see how scrapping perfectly good ambulances confronts the non-existent climate crisis, but it seems our governing elite now answer only to their own distorted sense of importance. 

Of course, the NHS is a national treasure. Its premise was once a simple one. Taxpayers pay the service to provide medical care when they’re significantly unwell. However, it seems that the threshold for care had been steadily lowered. The service now readily dishes out semaglutide prescriptions and bariatric surgery for the obese. Ambulances are frequently called for patients with a splinter, or they’ve poured milk over themselves. When I was a social worker, I had patients visiting A&E because they were lonely. Saddening as this is, the NHS was not established as a £170b befriending service. A&E’s have even turned people away aching from a body pump class. 

Yes, £170b for a service that persistently claims to be underfunded. If it is increasingly leaned upon to cure all life’s ills, then it will be eternally underfunded. Stressed teenagers, anxious parents, gambling problems, transgender operations, liposuction, the list goes on. It seems the NHS is managing an ever-increasing range of conditions, as society increasingly medicalises normal life, such as anxiety, mild depression, and stress. One can barely blame it for groaning beneath the weight of expectation. The only answer to which seems to be tapping up the hard working people of the UK for more hard-earned dosh.

The public sector spends money like a lottery winner immediately after having drunk their way out of a champagne jacuzzi. However, rather than jet skis and impulsive purchases of seaside properties, the NHS has recently offered a £100,000 contract for anti-racism consultancy services. One of the leading questions in the job interview might be ‘what do anti-racism consultancy services actually do for £100,000?’ Presumably designing posters declaring ‘Don’t be racist’ and ‘Don’t be ill if you’re white’.

Beyond purposefully running them over in NHS cars, it’s hard to see how even for £100k anti-racism consultants might increase representation of ethnic minorities in A&E - not that they ever are when I visit. Apparently the NHS trust wants a ‘solution’ which includes topics such as ‘racial equity, social justice, civility, cultural intelligence, and active bystander and inclusion’. It’s utterly unclear when a national health service decided it was responsible for social justice, but unsure it’s reassuring to the 1 in 5 Southend residents on waiting lists for medical attention that the people they’ve paid to provide the service are promoting divisive critical race theory. As to cultural intelligence, is there an IQ test to measure this? Presumably if you can’t name which theatre Verdi's Rigoletto and Aida was first performed, you’ll be excluded from the operating theatre. Perhaps considering social justice, no GPs will see any patients until the entire UK population can recite the entire works of Chaucer. Sadly, it’s more likely to be the other way round. As for ‘active bystander and inclusion’ the zoom calls to discuss this must be endlessly riveting.

And let’s not forget NHS Diversity managers, those £40k a year non-medical positions providing diversity, inclusion and delivering priority programmes of work (whatever they are) that are thanklessly grafting away behind the scenes. It’s likely these managers are responsible for ensuring new-born babies now only have their ‘gender identity’ recorded rather than their biological sex when discharged from some London hospitals. And since the NHS has a higher proportion of non-white workers than in the working age population in England, diversity managers have nothing left to do but to issue rainbow lanyards to squirrels and exit the building, presumably while avoiding frontline nursing staff on smaller salaries.  

For those receiving their tax demand letter there is a pie chart to illustrate where all their well-earned money is being better spent as seen by the government; that’s once you stop seeing stars. £168.8 billion, 20% of all tax revenue, goes on our health service, that’s twice what we spend on debt interest. It is a lot of money that even italics fail to truly convey the magnitude of. The height of a stack of one billion) one dollar bills measures 67.9 miles. From the earth’s surface this would reach into the lower portion of the troposphere. You could probably climb the NHS budget and reach the moon; we should count ourselves lucky there's no NHS middle management in charge of this.   

And let’s not forget how our beloved NHS employees were elevated to Key Workers during the so-called pandemic. It’s hard to think of a more divisive phrase than suggesting some jobs are more important than others. Not to the mouths being fed from the income there aren’t. The NHS is funded via taking a cut from every pay packet so every employee is a key worker, for themselves, their family, and the bottomless greed of the NHS, yet as delivery lorries plough through London cyclists, the last thing they see is that infantile NHS rainbow. Aliens would be tutting their heads at our puerile obsession with such meteorological phenomena we’ve known since our inception; it’s as though we’ve just drawn the curtains. 

It sometimes feels as though the NHS is so proud of its status as the World’s 5th biggest employer it wants to do better. That it employs 1.7m people and you still can’t get a GP appointment is astonishing. Mind you, this increasing medicalisation of everyday life represents a progressive lowering of treatment thresholds. Over a third of the UK population now has anxiety, which is no longer seen as a challenging human emotion to be met with forthright resolve and tough mornings, but a crippling infliction that demands to be medicated. As Dr Katie Musgrave puts it - ‘Is life not allowed to be shit sometimes?’

Even grief is now diagnosed as ‘bereavement reaction’. Meanwhile, making the NHS responsible (not directly due to their vending machines) for the increasing obesity crisis shows how personal responsibility is the first casualty in blanket state provision. There seemingly a current pandemic of autism, with everyone who can’t focus, or struggles to complete things, now looking for a ADHD diagnosis and some pills to help with the finishing coat of paint.

The NHS direct debit to big pharma currently stands at £17.8 billion per year, an increase of 8.32% from 2020/21. That’s a lot of pills. It even includes £142 m on aspirin and paracetamol and ibuprofen that can be bought for small change in the high street. It’s enough to give anyone a headache. We all know how the value of money diminishes if you’re spending someone else’s, but let’s not even get started on one NHS trust spending £32 on a 100-pack of toilet rolls while another pays £66. The cost of their bog roll stockpiles at the start of lockdown is probably hidden from public scrutiny by the amount of millions wasted on PPE.  At times our national health service has the financial acumen of a stag do. 

While nurses start their shift looking at ambulances backing down the street at A&E, with nothing but adrenaline and Snickers bars to get through the night, equality, diversity and inclusion managers, car parking environ­mental officers and art curator and programme managers (yes, someone does this at Homerton University Hospital Foundation Trust), are sleeping soundly beneath their NHS duvet covers wondering where it all went right.

If the NHS was a person, it would be the objectionable and demanding, meticulous colleague that no one wants to upset because they organise the work Christmas party, the one with a high regard for himself that he hopes disguises his deeply underwhelming IQ; the one who leaves all the office lights on because someone else is paying. They’d also be deaf to suggestions that the party might be held somewhere cheaper when they announce the kitty is too small.  

My book on writing - Idle Thoughts of an Idle Writer - is available at Amazon

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