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“Care in Europe is safer than NHS, death rates reveal” The Times 2.4.2015 page 35 – WHY NO COMPARISON WITH GERMANY, SWITZERLAND AND THE NETHERLANDS?

1. Have some responsibility for your own health. Don’t just leave it to what the State can afford.

2. Make it pay to keep healthy and ease the pressure on the NHS.

3. Slash National Insurance and substitute National Health Insurance for all who can afford to pay, not just those who work.

4. Learn from Holland, France and Germany.

5. Correct a 66 year old design fault in the NHS.

In the 1940’s when the NHS was created – a totally different world from today, when there was food rationing in the UK – did anyone anticipate the following:

1. How many people would be living well beyond retirement age, and  life expectancy for one in three born in 2015 would be to live to over 100?

2. How many new treatments and drugs  would be available in this century, their cost and the cost of the capital equipment supporting them?

3. Obesity would be a health problem along with alcoholism and smoking, and that on a Friday and Saturday evening 60% of admissions to A & E would be alcohol related?

3. The overall cost would be in the region of £100 billion annually, not very different from the entire tax receipts from employers and employees of National Insurance payments.

If a Mansion Tax was introduced it would scarcely scratch the surface of funding the NHS in future years.It would bring in only about £1.2 billion.

National Health Insurance would ensure that everyone would have to pay the premiums if they could afford it while they were benefiting from the NHS – until they died!

Isn’t it high time to ask some basic questions?

Shouldn’t you have a responsibility for your own health? Surely it should NOT be just the State’s responsibility? And shouldn’t  you be allowed to decide whether they can buy into the treatments that the State cannot afford to give you?

The taxpayer should not bear the entire cost of treatment when people are obese without medical reason, smoke, take drugs, booze on a Friday night and end up in A & E, or ride their bicycles carelessly and injure themselves or others.

Employees and their employers should buy into Health Insurance policies instead of paying into National Insurance. Dramatically scaled down National Insurance would cover the cost of those who could not afford their own Insurance and would not have to pay for it. The cost of the NHS is not very different from the amount raised by National Insurance.

That is why National Insurance contributions could then be slashed.

National Health Insurance should be payable after people retire and help to solve the problem of funding nursing home and residential home care without using all people’s savings or charging the State.

Like car insurance where good and safe driving is rewarded with no claim bonuses and negligent driving or driving with alcohol in the blood has a cost, health insurance would positively encourage people to keep well and be able to afford to help people when they are ill without present constraints.

And people, not just the State, will prioritise health care by the scale of cover they want to buy into. Not “Equal”, but “Fair”?

It is high time that politicians stopped making health care a political football and had the courage to deal with a basic design fault in the #NHS? <click YouTube>and I will give you a Manifesto Pledge for a Political Party that would deserve your vote, not try to gain it by false pretenses.

Other countries on the Continent of Europe adopt this policy. You don’t need to reinvent the wheel, you just have to find it.

The full case is argued on page 190 on the 2014 Version of Death of a Nightingale and in my Blog. <click and copy to your friends and colleagues>

NEW THINKING FOR A NEW CENTURY