The difference between how our UK NHS and the US insurance based healthcare systems will cope with this crisis may produce important and alarming data. I suspect it will show how private medicine is insufficient when everyone else’s state of health is a consideration (epidemic, pandemic, everyone etc), and we’ll see the US lower and middle classes hit very hard in this current crisis as the private healthcare sector acts principally to protect its shareholders and investors rather than its customers.

People seem unaware that the NHS was founded on the principle of social optimality, not economic optimality, and it is impossible for the two to be at the same intersect on an economic chart. This means the NHS will ALWAYS ALWAYS ALWAYS and forever run at a big loss, and we should be thankful for that institution above all others to do so, especially now.

No economist, banker, businessman or politician can achieve the miracle of aligning Social Optimality and Economic Optimality, despite what they and their supporters might claim. Private investment is ALWAYS for profit, it cannot ever, under any circumstances, provide for social optimality. In fact it causes exclusionary principles to arise in healthcare, the reason for this is that to turn a profit or break even a provider cannot let the product be given to those that cannot pay directly or indirectly for it, lest it fall into deficit rather than profit (the insurance/investment based system). Yes it’s possible to make it more efficient and better, but that doesn’t negate the facts. The US system excludes millions of people who can’t pay, and it partially excludes millions of people who cannot pay enough because they could not afford the highest levels of insurance. Our NHS excludes nobody, not even those who have absolutely nothing to contribute, you get no bill for your treatment, it is not a charity nor is it a business. Don’t raise money for the NHS, instead demand that politicians tax the wealthy and businesses to the same extent as they tax the working people, and that they spend the money on this and other socially optimal outcomes first rather than on vanity projects and shiny new devices of death…

NHS and care workers are heroes, but they shouldn’t need to be, and shouldn’t be working as hard as they are now. The sector doesn’t cope well at the best of times with the normal demand it faces. Anyone who doesn’t put that fact down to a decade of austere Tory rule is a fucking moron with dissonance issues, for their motivation in underfunding this the best of all institutions can only be to cause it’s perceptual failure, so it can be changed in nature for an alternative, one that makes money for the corporate sector, without a backlash from the masses. I suspect their chance is now gone and their hand may be forced in another direction, there’s simply no way for them to look good from this, if the NHS copes it looks like it can cope, if it doesn’t it looks like the government let it down. Some will disagree, but who else could be to blame for healthcare failures of any nature, is it the sick, the hospital staff, the scientist that cure diseases, or maybe the flying spaghetti monster? Or is it those that decide budgets and oversight?

Some people think that walking to the moon is the greatest achievement of mankind, personally I think it’s Bevan’s NHS..

Paul S Wilson.