General Studies
You cannot put a price on human life
“My Government will continue to modernise the delivery of health care, based on the finding principals of the National Health Service” which is what the Queen said in her speech in 2002. Since then approximately £45billion has been spent on maintaining areas of the NHS and modernising others. There are further plans to increase the NHS spending budget to approximately £56.9billion.
The NHS was set up over 50 years ago is the largest organisation in Europe. In 2002, 1628 babies were born, 1452 people died, 10,670 operations were performed and 270 operations were cancelled all within the NHS. Plans to increase the standard of the NHS are still being made.
In 2001 5 politicians gave speeches on the NHS, one of these politicians was the prime minister, Tony Blair. The prime minister Said “We want to see more money being spent on the NHS, we want to see reductions in waiting lists, and more reductions in waiting times”. These plans can only be fulfilled if the government has enough money to spend on the proposed future developments, but how can this be achieved?
The money that the government receives for its “Expenditure Budget” comes from the Tax Payers, some areas of the expenditure budget do outweigh others, as shown in Fig. 1. The areas, which the government’s budget is mostly spent on, are Health care and Education. Approximately £49.4billion is spent on Education and £47.9billion is spent on the NHS.
Returning to The Prime Ministers speech. He said that he wants to see a reduction in waiting lists and waiting times. One of the factors affecting the waiting times and lists is the lack of beds available to patients. There are over 5000 people (Mainly old age pensioners) stuck in hospitals because they cannot find suitable accommodation for themselves. A lady called Joy was in the hospital’s “Home Placements” ward for over 361 days before being released, not because of the NHS but because of the unavailability of private accommodation for NHS patients.
There are other alternatives to the NHS, private health services. Private health services such as The “Wellcome Foundation” which is an independent research funding charity who claim that their mission is “To foster and promote research with the aim of improving human health” as noble as their statement maybe, these services come with a cost. It is hard to tell whether private health companies are concerned with the well being of their patients or with the money.
One of the reasons that health care is such a delicate topic is because the media has made it this way. Right wing media which, are for example newspapers which are against the governments methods such as “The Daily Mail” and the “Daily Express” often print very critical stories about the current status of the NHS, and often print “scare stories” to alter the publics view on the government.
There are many possible solutions to the ongoing NHS problem but it is hard to say which solutions are viable, effective or unrealistic.
The obvious idea would be to give the government more money to spend on the NHS, there are many possible methods of obtaining the money, but not all of them would be viable. First of all, one solution would be to increase tax, thus supplying the government with a higher expenditure budget, but not everyone would be happy with the tax increase, such as the taxpayers. Surely they are paying enough already.
The second solution to obtaining more money would be to spend less money on some areas of the departmental expenditure areas, such as education (see Fig. 1). Although there is now more money being spent on the NHS other areas of development like education would suffer, so increasing the expenditure budget for the NHS is not a viable proposition, as it will affect other areas of development. The final solution for increasing the departmental expenditure budget for the NHS is similar to the Liberal Democrats idea of “putting a penny on top of every pound” which would go directly to education, but instead “putting a penny on top of every pound” which would go straight to the NHS. The final solution is a much more realistic proposition, and I believe that it would benefit the NHS immensely in the future if it was implemented.
Another way of solving the problems of the NHS instead of just giving it a higher budget is a little more extreme, and is the conservative’s idea of “Privatisation”. The idea was to sell the NHS to the highest bidder and making patients pay for their treatments and health insurance themselves. The money left over from budget cuts from the NHS would be used to fund other areas of development. This idea was put forward to the public but the majority of people didn’t want to see the NHS become a privatised organisation.
The debate of what will happen with the NHS is ongoing, the government’s plans to improve the standards of the NHS are yet to be seen, but maybe in time they will achieve their targets, and maybe the NHS will be the ideal health service that the public have been waiting for, but only time will tell.
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