Latest Blog Post

This was on the front page of The Times on Monday 16^th April.

It made me laugh out loud because there are three books that I would like to write myself if I ever get a chance.

1. ‘The Magic Bullet Theory’. It would be a cracker, ask me about it if you ever see me and I’ll tell you the story.
2. I’ve already started and is called ‘Book Number One’. Again, ask me about it and I’ll tell you the story.
3. This was essentially about personal health budgets, no name yet, I had developed the plan for this about 15 years ago.

In essence, the National Health Service in the UK now costs every single man, woman and child roughly £2,000 per year, so just give them the money back. You could produce a shiny laminate gold voucher, a bit like a bank note, that everybody would get in the post once a year.

Of course, it wouldn’t actually be like that, it would be virtual but you know what I mean.

You could then do whatever you wanted with that voucher.

1. Use it to buy total health insurance.
2. Save it up until you needed it, after 10 years you would have £20,000 worth of voucher and if you needed a hip replacement you could go to the very best buy in the very best place and pay for it (you’d be out of vouchers though).
3. Sell them on the black market and spend the money on cheap cider, crack or expensive road bikes.

The potential concept is interesting, but the discussion about where that would take society is fascinating.

It couldn’t possibly work, this business of putting the emphasis of healthcare back onto the individual. Clearly, that would create enormous gaps of injustice and inequity within society.

But are you telling me the system is working now?

Has anybody been watching Hospital on BBC2?

The government have decided to extend the already existing process of personal health budgets and some people get up to as much as £250,000 a year to employ their own carers and create their own environments. There is a much more sinister agenda here, which is the privatisation of healthcare by stealth, so let’s just be a little bit more open about it.

There are 5 members of my family and so we would get £10,000 a year for healthcare budget. We would take responsibility for our own healthcare and probably invest heavily in insurance to cover the unexpected but we would probably have health budget left after we had done that to save up for other healthcare benefits.

The future isn’t all about artificial intelligence and nanotechnology. Delivery systems, and in fact the fundamental way in which we view how health care, is obtained and paid for in the UK, this will change beyond recognition of what exists today and we need to be involved in the discussion of what that will look like.

Blog post number: 1620