Will the NHS still exist in 10 year time?

The NHS is a great British achievement, possibly one of our greatest ever.  It's a noble attempt to help everyone in the country, a socialist dream, treating each as they need and through tax/national insurance, taking from each of us what we can give.  The ideals of the NHS are what life should be about.

Sadly, I think it's fucked.  And I think it's being fucked on purpose.

International health care providers having been eyeing up the NHS and the UK as a potential place to make a profit for a long time.  The UK is a rich country with a fairly low spend on healthcare per head of population.  We, the UK, as a nation, could afford to spend more on healthcare.  We just choose not to.  We spend money on shiny things like Brexit and nuclear weapons instead, as our elected representatives choose to fulfil the masturbatory fantasies of our right wing lunatic fringe instead of looking after the health of the nation properly.

New and better treatments for previously untreatable diseases are becoming available.  The BBC news today carried a story about a potential good treatment for Huntington's Disease, one of the most horrific neurodegenerative conditions in existence.  This will not be cheap.  We now have several good treatments for melanoma and multiple sclerosis.  We exist in a health utopia but it is an expensive health utopia.  Rightly or wrongly, the pharmaceutical companies who help develop these drugs want to make a profit and the NHS has to pay.  But the NHS does not have enough money.

The public expects more from the NHS and healthcare than it did in the past.  The NHS is a monopoly provider in the UK.  For 99% of the population there is no good alternative to an NHS hospital in the UK if you have a medical emergency.  Out population is living longer, partly because of the NHS, and our older people are more frail with advanced age.  Frailty results in more hospital admissions and more costs.  The NHS is challenged by it's own success.  Without more money it is doomed.

Brexit has fucked the pound so European doctors and nurses who work here now earn less money.  The jingoistic shite involved with Brexit is deterring European doctors and nurses from coming to work here.  The UK does not train enough doctors or nurses to properly staff the NHS and Jeremy Hunt has done a lot (in terms of Junior Doctor contracts and removing bursaries from nursing students) to deter people from wanting to work in healthcare.  At the end of the day, who wants to do a 12 hour nightshift in A&E where drunk people swear at you and try and punch you if you are being paid fuck all for it.

The NHS is being defunded into the ground by a bunch of right wing money heads.  Artificial targets are being used to punish hospitals and cost more money.  There are multiple layers of useless managers, almost like onion skins in their ability to make you cry.  And yet we can waste money on Brexit and nuclear weapons we can never use.

For the NHS to survive it needs more money or rationing.  We will probably end up with a co-payment system or some sort of multi-tier service that will divide the rich and poor.  Out ancestors, who fought world war 2 will be spinning in their graves.

If you voted Tory or Brexit, pat yourself on your back.