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