https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-62042465
The NHS was created when Britain was a far less wealthy nation than now. It has withstood all kinds of social/cultural change over the decades. But probably no institution can fully survive the level of incompetence and extreme ideological opposition (to "socialist" universal healthcare) brought by this rightwing conservative government for the last 12 years. The criminal mismanagement of a pandemic, Brexitf*ckingshambles and the resulting economic collapse, the staggering corruption (do you remember the £37 BILLION of taxpayers money that went into Dido Harding's failed test & trace circus?), privatisation by stealth (GP practices being taken over by US corporations, even Peter Thiel's nefarious US data/"defence" company, Palantir, wanting a big chunk of the NHS pie). The systematic underfunding and "reforming" (both general features in the privatisation playbook, if past sell-offs of infrastructure are anything to go by).
So, not surprisingly (and worryingly) it's taking its toll in various ways. The latest reported being the thousands of desperate people being forced into paying for private operations. See this new BBC report.
No doubt the rightwing press, the far-right ideologues, the dubious online "influencers", the malign bullsh*t artists, the Dominic Cummings's, Nigel Farages, Michael Goves (or their latest equivalents/replacements), the "take back control" idiots, even some gullible lefties, will use the situation to promote their own agenda, blame it on immigrants, the unemployed, the "woke virus", Bill Gates, whatever. None of it backed by actual hard data, unlike the real causes found in conservative government actions - an attribution of blame backed by a colossal amount of reports and data over the years, mostly unreported by the rightwing press.
It's becoming ever more clear that the government strategy is to bleed the NHS financially until it crashes so they have an excuse for back door privatisation (as Palladium suggested in July).
Just a reminder: Liz Truss is on the board of the 1828 group, and is a big ideological supporter of 1828.
1828 is a far-right "think tank". One of its core aims is to abolish the NHS.
We're now past the latest Covid peak, so this message will seem unfashionable, unpopular & unwanted. But because of the high increase of hospital admissions seen during the latest variant surge, it's still killing the NHS, which is already under impossible strain due to 12 years of government by hard-right Conservatives ideologically opposed to universal healthcare (although they pretend otherwise in public, while they do deals with US medical corporations like Centene - now the biggest single operator of GP practices in the UK).
Liar-clown-twerp Boris Johnson, who kept saying everything was peachy, and that we don't need to take any precautions to prevent transmission, has a lot to answer for, quite apart from giving a***holes a bad name.
The irony of this (as with past privatisations) is that conservative market fundamentalists, whose ideologically-driven underfunding led to this, will say: "See, it's not fit for purpose, so we'll have to start charging people and get the market to run it".
And the same folk who bought into "taking back control" and all the other BS, will swallow it. 😠
I got a date sent by mail today from the hospital where I had an examination earlier this year for a phone follow up appointment on 15th August. It happened to be at the same day as another appointment I already had arranged (perhaps ironically for my will signing). I rang the hospital to rearrange the date. The next available slot was in December. For a phone call! I decided to rearrange my other appointment.