Column

In sickness, not health

A health service is the last thing we need, says Eric the Heretic

’The trouble with the health service is that it is a sickness service, not a health service.’

How often have you heard that old cliche? Too often, if you have spent enough time hanging around the Labour party or the unions over the last twenty years or so. I’ve held my tongue, in the interests of fraternal unity and other over-rated ideas, when some rabble-rouser has parroted that appalling rubbish to the delight of a dimwitted audience. No wonder Labour’s policy for the health service has been so dismal, tailing the Tories on almost all issues. And no wonder the unions have been so impotent in the face of the NHS reforms, since they obviously don’t have the first clue what the health service is about.

Who wants a health service anyway? Who wants professionals telling us how to be healthy, as if we didn’t know already? Condescending schoolmarm types lecturing on healthy foods, earnest young medics droning on about the sins of drinking, smoking and lounging about, busybodies stopping you in the street to warn about sunburn -- you can keep them!

Spoonfeeding for the feeble-minded -- which is what most of the nation now seems to be. Life without experts, without mummy and daddy to tell you how to behave, seems too frightening. Give us a health service, quick, before we have to get off our backsides or use our brains!

And look where it’s got us. Doctors who are too busy giving health checks to the neurotic middle class and pestering perfectly fit pensioners to bother with the really ill. Fringe cranks trying to ‘balance energies’ in neurotics and hypochondriacs with needles and herbs and God knows what. Health educators spawning like frogs in every puddle, writing their tracts and scripting dire videos. And every bloody one of them needing £30,000 from you and me to keep up their own very healthy lifestyle.

Which is what it’s all about, isn’t it? We plebs need a ‘health service not a sickness service’, but the professionals will settle for cash. They aren’t so dumb after all -- they know the therapeutic value of income redistribution. So we end up with a health service that cancels operations and boots ill people out of hospital, so it can employ ever more workers to promote our health, at ever greater costs, with ever diminishing results.

That’s where this nonsense about a sickness service has got us. A sickness service is exactly what we do need, and we’re losing it. When I’m ill I want attention, fast, an accurate diagnosis and the right treatment. When I’m well I want to be left alone. That doesn’t mean I don’t care about healthiness and prevention, just that medics don’t know better than I do. If I smoke, drink and eat too much it’s because of the time and place I live. Putting that right is a political task, and it’s a job for me -- not the great professionals in uniform.

Let the doctors and nurses and paramedics get on with treating the sick, and leave the politics -- the real health promotion -- to the people.