I want this post to be the definitive post that people can share when people make factually incorrect assumptions, fallacious claims or down right lies about the UK’s NHS (National Health Service).

The real cost of the NHS

The official NHS statistics, facts and figures shows that the cost incurred for the NHS continues to climb. The Labour party will tell you that the Conservative government have reduced the funding due to austerity however the statistics prove this is a lie. Additionally the Conservative government will tell you they intend to pour more money into the NHS than any government has before. Therefore both parties clearly demonstrate that they are socialists and that they do not fundamentally understand economics.

In the year 2016/17 the NHS cost the UK tax payers £120.512 billion pounds. The UK population today is approximately 66.44 million people. If we presume that at least two thirds of the population of the United Kingdom today work that is 44.293 million people. [According to the 2011 Census nearly two thirds of the population at the time were of ‘working age’]. That means that the NHS for the year 2016/17 cost each individual tax payer £2720.79 per year or £226.73 per month.

The data also shows that the NHS funding has continued to increase. Their estimated budget for 2018/19 is expected to be £123.202 billion pounds. The NHS routinely exceeds their budget and ends up in a deficit. So the absolute best case scenario for the real cost to tax payers for the year 2019/20 will be £231.79 per month, how much is too much? We should also bare in mind that we have an aging population, which of course means that the figures I’ve used were very generous as I assumed that at least two thirds of the population are in gainful employment. We also need to take into account that both the Conservative party and the Labour party wish to increase this cost as expressed in their manifesto’s. So the figure is almost certain to be higher than this already ridiculous number.

But look at how bad America’s “private” healthcare is in comparison

The world perceives the US healthcare system to be a laissez-faire free market health care system, so they then look at the disasters that occur and blame the free market.

You routinely see videos showing how expensive healthcare would be without the NHS using the American system as an example of what healthcare would cost without our leaders forcing us to pay for the NHS. They routinely reference that in the US childbirth on average costs $10,000, ambulance call outs cost $2,500 or that contraception such as the coil or IUD costs on average $1,300. They without a shred of research, statistics or data annoyingly assume that this is the result of the free market. They explain that this somehow proves that the state forced NHS monopoly works and that the “free market” healthcare in the US doesn’t work. They blame the free market for the insane costs even though they recognise that the US healthcare system is monopolised itself. The issue here of course is that their assumption itself contains a contradiction.

They espouse that the free market is made up of people, and people are likely to become dangerous capitalists if they have freedom. They say that the Capitalist will gain monopolies and take advantage of customers. They fear the freedom to associate, the freedom to choose and instead prefer a democratically elected government to force everyone to do what most voters prefer to happen. They fail to see that the government is made up of people from the same society. They fail to see that the only way monopolies can form and be maintained is through government intervention. Capitalists must use the power of the state to gain a monopoly, there is no other way to do so. They finally fail to see that they hold the view that monopolies are bad in the US, and that monopolies are good in the UK. The reason they end up holding such insane contradictory views is because they are starting with a conclusion, a provably wrong one.

The reason that the NHS really is costing each tax payer at the very least £231.79 per month is because it is a government forced monopoly. The reason the US healthcare system costs so much is… you guessed it, again because of the government intervention.

Healthcare is not actually that expensive. There is a vast difference between what it costs and what people get charged in the US healthcare system. Dr. Keith Smith from the Surgery Center of Oklahoma has provided a comprehensive pricing list of what the cost of surgery can cost even with these overreaching regulations. Because of their competitive pricing they have treated patients from all 50 US states. Price gauging occurs in the US healthcare system due to the dysfunctional nature of the regulations that the government have inflicted on the US citizens. The healthcare providers have used the state to create regulations which enable this scenario to occur. The entities involved have worked very hard and spent a lot of money to gain these regulatory favours that allowed them to gain monopolies, maintain their monopolies and price gouge the consumer.

The US healthcare system is insurance based, however it is unlike any other insurance that occurs in the free market. When you insure your car for example you wouldn’t insure an oil change, or with your house insurance you wouldn’t insure a light bulb change either. However in the US with healthcare insurance they have conditioned people to think of healthcare insurance as a universal coverage for every eventuality even the most basic, this is because there are many financial benefactors for orienting the system in this way. This is only possible due to the government interference i.e. regulation benefiting their benefactors. The purpose of insurance is fundamentally for the purpose of covering uncertain situations. For healthcare that would be health and medical uncertainty, for cars potential accidents, damage or theft and house insurance for similar uncertain potential eventualities.

The American system is a pre-pay system through a third party intermediary. Because of this the prices are driven very high, as the patient isn’t paying so does not receive a bill during the use of the service, so rarely see the actual cost. On top of this there is evidence of government regulations preventing entrepreneurs from providing the level of insurance which offers what people actually want. The insurance industry is essentially then forced to provide and promote services that nobody actually want but are forced to buy anyway due to regulations. To then make the situation even worse the deductibles/excess is/are so high (in some cases over $5000), that the insurance policies become null and void. Obamacare is so horrendously thought out that people in the US in some cases are actually better off not having insurance, paying the fine for not having insurance and then pay for the surgery/treatment with their own money as the deductible would be more costly.

Furthermore the US healthcare insurance requires employers to provide healthcare insurance policies for employees. This has a catastrophic effect. People become woefully dependent on their jobs and potentially accept a lower salary than they would otherwise. But most importantly this is what is driving the cost of healthcare in the US to such ridiculous levels. Because insurance is being forced to be provided to people with pre-existing medical conditions, meaning that the insurance model is no longer insurance by definition. It would logically be the same as insuring your car after you’ve had an accident, or insuring your house after it’s burnt down. You know what would happen to car insurance premiums if insurance companies were forced by the government to cover people after they’d had an accident don’t you. Of course the cost of car insurance would rocket to un-affordable levels as no one would bother to buy insurance until they had an accident. Or cars or other automobiles would become prohibitively expensive if the government created regulations which further monopolised the automobile industry.

Therefore the US healthcare system is according to Cambridge Dictionary definition not insurance and it is certainly not an example of a free market healthcare system because of the government dictating the insurance provided, forcing companies to insure pre-existing conditions and government regulation preventing competitors to enrich their donors.

Sadly because people are not aware of basic economics such as the reality that nothing is free and because most people are truly great, well intended, kind and caring individuals they get taken in by the Socialist ideology. Sadly the opposite outcome to their intend goal almost universally occurs. Because of this there are literally zero examples of a free market healthcare system anywhere in the world today.

The argument against socilised healthcare from morality

We must firstly deal with the central problem which is that people assume when someone argues to stop the NHS that they wish to do away with health care all together. This is predicated on the assumption that if the government do not provide a health service that no one else will. This of course is false. We need healthcare in the same way that we need sustenance to survive. Yet we do not need to rely on a single entity for sustenance rather an entire plethora of choice is available to us courtesy of the free market. In the West we no longer just eat to survive we have made an art form out of cooking. In towns and cities across the UK we have food available to us from the four corners of the world. We celebrate a hither to unheard of diversity of choice thanks to the lack of state intervention in the means of production.

The fundamental issue I believe is that so many people in the Western world hold an entitled mentality. They believe that they have a right to health care. On the face of it, it seems distasteful to say that no one has a right to health care doesn’t it. However we need to break this down further, if we are to say that we have a right to health care we are saying that we have a right to the property, labour and skills of individuals in the health care sector, Doctors, nurses, surgeons, physiotherapists, mental health specialist ET AL. These individuals have spent 1000’s of hours honing their skills in this field over doing something else. They have chosen to better themselves, give themselves a skill which they can use to be more productive to society. It is immoral, evil even to say we are entitled to their property. Sounds an awful lot like slavery really doesn’t it.

Imagine how ridiculous it would sound if someone stated they had a right to a coffee from Starbucks, or a right to a shopping trolley full of groceries from Tesco’s. Imagine arguing with the security guards at the supermarket that it is not theft because I have a fundamental human right to sustenance. People would think you were unstable, yet this is the argument people routinely use for socialised healthcare.

If we look at all countries historically or currently where the state holds a complete monopoly through controlling of the means of production (raw materials, facilities, machinery and tools used in the production of goods and services) we see extreme poverty, increased infant mortality, increased violent crime and of course empty supermarket shelves. This happens because when everyone is given a right to a good or service for “free” eventually what happens is that there is an extreme shortage of that good or service meaning many starve to death. Imagine for a second that you live in a society where the state controls everything. No matter what effort you put in you get the same outcome. You see work colleagues doing literally nothing get the same outcome as you. If you produce value far in excess of what you receive, just how long do you think even the best of us will continue in such an ambition destroying nightmare. This is why in Socialist countries people queue for hours and hours for loaves of bread only to find that the supermarket shelves are empty, this is why people die waiting for life saving treatments. Nothing is free.

Venezuela under Socialism the currency is worthless

Venezuela supermarket shelves empty under Socialism

If state intervention has almost universally caused monopolies to form, which has universally reduced the overall quality of goods, services, overall life quality, life expectancy, reduced poverty, increased crime and increased infant mortality amongst other stone age level problems then anyone who argues for state intervention who know that is in fact immoral must prefer human suffering. They must operate on the assumption that they are inferior and that in a free market they would not be productive enough to exist. They would rather everyone suffered to prevent their personal delusional nightmares from coming true.

I believe that many government officials understand at least at a subconscious level the immorality that predicates their position, the fact that they are able to have their opinions be re-labelled as law and forced on the citizenry. An example of people understanding this is that whenever a corporation or bank is on the brink of collapse people worry that the public will have less choice if there is one less car manufacturer or if there is one less travel agency. They fear monopolies forming, so almost universally they want to bail them out, and sadly typically they succeed which couldn’t be worse for society. They fear monopolies forming, yet they ignore that the NHS is a a monopoly itself. They simultaneously hold the views that monopolies are bad and that monopolies must be defended. It goes without saying that these view points are contradictory. With the NHS we have no choice, we are forced to pay for this service whether we use it or not and in the event that we do need to use it typically we realise it isn’t adequate in the same way that people in socialist countries hoard supplies because without cost it’s human nature to take more than one needs and quickly the shelves are bare in supermarkets and queues a mile long form daily. Thus people are forced to pay again for their healthcare through savings or debt using instead private healthcare or what ever vestiges of it remain through the state enforced monopoly which is the NHS.

So that you understand how the NHS is funded you must understand that the government has no money of it’s own. In order to fund the NHS the Central Bank of England must create money out of thin air. Of course doing so increases the money supply. Remember the government and the Bank of England is just a small group of people like you or I. If you or myself was to create money out of thin air the same way these people do it would be called money forgery and we would be criminally prosecuted. Having an unsound currency I believe is the root cause of almost all societal, political and economic issues we see today, it’s the reason the government has managed to grow so large. We’ve established that the government’s prevent other people from creating currency and force people to use their currency such as the £ pound sterling in the UK.

If you bought a print from an artist and the cost was based on the fact that only 50 copies will ever be produced, what do you think the value of your print would be if the artist was to print 100’s of copies? The value of your print would obviously nose dive. Thus when the state choose to increase the money supply they are stealing from the citizens by eroding the value of the currency that the citizens are forced to use. This was only achievable through force initially and now it’s achieved through ignorance. This process is a fairly new process in the Western world which all started when America came off the gold standard in September 19th 1931 and the rest of the world followed suit. This is the a hidden tax, the worst tax of them all by a considerable margin.

It’s preferable for couples to have have happy marriages, it’s better for the children, it’s better for the economy and it’s more stable. However I’m sure you wouldn’t want the government to choose your partner and force you to marry who they choose, with the threat of imprisonment if you do not marry your government chosen suitor.

Do you think that people should be able to disagree with you without the threat of being thrown in jail? I would imagine you are a sane person and obviously agree with this. However that is exactly what will happen to anyone who tries to resist the force being initiated on the citizens by the government to acquire the capital necessary through direct taxation or inflation. You have one way of providing healthcare to the poor, I have another way which I want to use to solve the healthcare problem. For the NHS to continue to exist I am forced to agree with you. So this means that all socialists want the government to force everyone else to follow their opinion or else. The use of force is of course an act of violence.

It is a performative contradiction or a logical contradiction to be a socialist and be against violence as social programs require the use of violence. To say that violence is wrong, and that I want to use violence to achieve my ends is a logical contradiction. If violence is wrong it must be universally wrong, it cannot be wrong today but right tomorrow, it cannot be right when the state is big, but wrong when the state is small. It’s either right or it’s wrong. Otherwise there is no such thing as good or evil and everything must be relative. If you profess to be against violence you cannot say that violence is right if we are pursuing the education of children, or pursuing the healthcare or welfare for the poor. This would be to say that the violence is legitimized by the end, or that violence is good if the outcome is preferable to you. This is immoral, this is evil and this is precisely what the government is.

Moral Relativism is in and of itself a self detonating presupposition, as saying that something is relative is saying that it is always relative or universally relative, which of course makes it not relative. This is because the concept of moral relativism presumes that there is no universal or absolute moral principles. For example if you say that I am wrong you can only do so by confirming truth to be an objective preferred conclusion, and this is true with all debates. For moral relativism to be true; truth, falsehood, good and evil have to be subjective i.e. you would have to not prefer truth over falsehood or for that matter have no measure at all. However taking part in any debate one must universally prefer truth over falsehood as an objective measure. If moral relativism was correct it would mean that there is no difference between good and evil, rape, murder, genocide or any other despicable action you can imagine would not be considered evil to a moral relativist. So you see the central problem here is that you can profess to be a moral relativist, you can discuss moral relativism abstractly, however no one can possibly be a moral relativist as it does not exist in reality. This is Aristotelian metaphysics.

Violence is always wrong, except in an extremity of self defense.

Arguing against socialised healthcare with the argument from effect

The common notion today sadly is that people on the political left supposedly care about the poor, and that libertarians or anarcho capitalists supposedly do not care about the poor. However the free market has a far greater track record on reducing poverty, and providing services to people in society. Essentially it is logical to say that socialists have clearly not looked at the historical evidence or the statistics which are readily available online, rather they have fears or conclusions which are outside of reality and are provably irrational. This of course does not mean that they do not care about the poor, just that anarcho capitalists are much more morally consistent.

In the West slavery was once considered to be moral only 154 years ago, homosexuals were repressed and in some cases were chemically castrated for their sexuality only 67 years ago and the subjugation of women only 99 years ago in Western culture these were all once considered perfectly accepted norms. We have certainly come a long way thankfully. Morally speaking you could argue confidently that moral values have advanced. I can not imagine anyone in the right mind arguing for these barbaric practices to come back into being, however the moral sphere needs to be widened further.

In the 19th century arguments from effect were made by the majority of the population to maintain slavery as it was considered a normal practice, a moral practice and people did not believe the population could survive without slaves. Go forward 154 years and those same arguments are being used today for governments. “Government violence is OK, because the outcome is preferable to the many.” “Without governments providing healthcare the poor will die.” “Without governments we wouldn’t have roads.” In the 19th century those same arguments would have been something like this; “The violence used to maintain slaves is OK, because we need them for farming.” “Without slaves the cost of living would cause the poor to die due to starvation.” “Without slaves who will work the fields.” These statements sound morally reprehensible don’t they. Well hopefully in another 154 years people will look back at these statements the majority use today and realise those statements to be equally despicable.

How are we going to take care of the sick and the poor without the NHS?

The main reason people want the NHS is because they believe that without the NHS disabled, vulnerable or poor people are going to die, because they will be unable to afford healthcare.

The first thing we must ask is, is this a fact or an opinion? I care about the poor, you care about the poor too and I’m sure as do many individuals who are pro NHS seemingly as it is their assumption that the poor would have no healthcare without the NHS or could not afford what the market offered. If the majority of voters were disinterested in ensuring healthcare is provided voluntarily for the sick, disabled, vulnerable or the poor then the NHS or the Welfare system as a whole would not have been democratically voted into being in the first place. Therefore this must be an anti-rational position.

If it is simply something people are afraid of happening then we can look at historical examples, of course again historical evidence counters this fear. Statistics almost universally show that when the market is freer poverty reduces [Link link]. When the government nationalise or provide a welfare state the level of poverty has almost universally increased. Welfare programs trap people in poverty rendering them dependent on the state through the encouragement and rewards they provide for making bad decisions which would otherwise have been a life lesson to provide one with a opportunity for self improvement. The special favours that governments grant to companies lead to monopolies forming through tax breaks or barriers to entry via draconian regulation preventing competition leaving the poor with fewer opportunities for work, thus being stuck with a low income job. Quite frankly I believe the poor can handle being free to choose for themselves.

Problems caused by socialised healthcare

It is well understood that in order to remain healthy we need to have regular exercise, maintain a healthy diet, 6-8 hours of sleep, refrain from consuming alcohol, not smoke cigarettes/e-cigs or partake in other substances which are scientifically proven to detrimentally effect health and well-being. However in the West it is understood that around 70-75% of healthcare costs are attributed to behavioral or lifestyle choices. People eat too much fatty foods, they are lazy, they drink too much alcohol and smoke too many cigarettes. According to the NHS statistics they deal with approximately 1 million customers every 36 hours. This means that between 700,000 – 750,000 of their customers require assistance due their own bad lifestyle decisions.

As previously mentioned above government social programs completely remove the consequences for bad decisions and instead reward bad decisions and penalize good decisions. With healthcare this is proven by the fact that people who choose to lead healthy lifestyles are forced to subsidize the cost of providing the healthcare to those who lead unhealthy lifestyles.

This is why in the West we are faced with a drug epidemic, an obesity epidemic, a dramatic increase in diabetes, people suffering from high blood pressure, high cholesterol amongst many other conditions that are dramatically increased by bad lifestyle choices. The purpose of healthcare fundamentally is to cover you for the unforeseen and the unlikely. It is supposed to aide those terribly unlucky ones who develop horrible conditions through no fault of their own.

Would you think it wise to encourage a gambling addict to continue his habits by giving him a loan? This is essentially what the NHS does when it enables people to make bad lifestyle choices through subsidising and obfuscating the negative financial and personal consequences.

In a free market system the cost of medication for obesity for example would make becoming obese, or maintaining unhealthy levels of excess body fat prohibitively expensive to most and they would be more likely to spend more time on preparing healthy food and maintaining a healthy diet, over unhealthy diets causing an inflating money supply through inefficient socialised healthcare. Take into account that according to the NHS statistics children growing up in a poor household are far more likely to be obese. They suggest that changes in society, rather than poverty itself, is behind the shift. For example, people with less time to prepare food are more likely to choose ready made meals high in saturated fats and other nasty preservatives that are scientifically linked to various forms of cancer and other diseases. Whilst there is a short term time benefit to this, the long term health costs would make this decision untenable in a free market as individuals would face the consequence of making bad decisions. In a free market this would only effect the parents, however with socialised healthcare everyone pays for this mistake and the entailment of bad habits and abuse continues. The fact that the cost for healthcare is being excluded from the parents equation (the perception that healthcare is free) I believe is attributing to the parents decision to increase their children’s likeliness to develop life altering conditions through child obesity. This I believe is child abuse as parents are choosing to feed their children foods which they know to negatively effect their health, for the sake of laziness.

A free market healthcare system encourages exercise, healthy diets and discourages partaking in the consumption of alcohol or other drug use which provably effect their health because it is much cheaper to be healthy in a free market than to be unhealthy. In a socilised system that difference is eradicated. People in a free market system are of course free to eat unhealthy foods or drink alcohol but they maintain responsibility for their own actions. We are not children afterall, surely we have the self confidence and self worth as a society to be accountable for our own mistakes.

Another issue socialised healthcare causes is that the end user is not aware of what the service is costing. In a free market situation going to see ones GP (General Practitioner) would incur a cost, either directly based on a per visit basis or covered through an insurance scheme presumably. This cost would deter someone from scheduling an appointment to see a GP which could be considered to be a waste of time. In a socialised system because the cost is hidden through inflation the end user will be far more likely to schedule appointments with their GP. Everyone instinctively knows this. Imagine walking in a city and you see a street vendor presumably selling drinks, he/she looks to be doing the hard sell approach it seems. What would happen if you realise having got closer to the vendor that he/she is handing out the drinks for free. Of course most people will take one.

They want to sell off our NHS

First of all socialism is using force to extract capital from capitalists to redistribute to where socialists believe capital is needed rather than where it would naturally be distributed. Every aspect of the NHS or any social program for that matter must steal funds through taxation or inflation from the market capital created by capitalists. Socialism does not create anything. This is why millions have universally died through democide because the government have co-opted the entire market through force and there is practically nothing left for them to steal, other than from the black markets that form to keep people alive.

Look at the NHS, who produces their pharmaceutical supplies? Who trains the doctors, surgeons? Who designs and develops their machinery such as MRI machines or X-Rays? Who builds the buildings? All aspects of the NHS rely on the market. Private companies compete to produce pharmaceutical products, which the NHS then uses funds it’s forcefully obtained from taxation or inflation to purchase.

Limiting the companies that can supply the NHS increases the cost and reduces the efficiency of the system, yet people argue that allowing competition to provide these services is somehow “selling” the NHS. We have established that the NHS produces nothing itself, it operates inefficiently, and so therefore if it was a business it would be bankrupt. The NHS is an amalgamation of capital assets and individuals from the free market who are forced to operate how the government believe best, to provide a service through force that people already need, and that the market would be providing anyway.

The NHS routinely overpay for supplies. The National Audit Office found that the NHS have been found to be paying on average 50% more for products than the cost which said products are readily available in the marketplace. In some cases they were even found to be paying 100% more. This report was done in 2011. Another report was done in 2019, which found that the overspending had continued. The mainstream media however instead of blaming inefficiency now blame austerity, but if they actually looked at the figures for the funding the NHS receives they would not be making this argument as they are factually wrong. Article from 2019. This demonstrates that the NHS is inefficient, and has been for some time. The reason for this should be obvious by now. If you had the ability to steal money “morally” from people of course you wouldn’t think twice about how it is spent. Where as if money is earnt through competing to provide a better good and service to the consumer than anyone else, then the moneys true value is realised and so the money is efficiently spent. Easy come easy go.

Conclusion

The NHS is inefficient, ineffective compared to free market alternatives, coercive, heavily in debt, slow, subject to pressure group influence, immoral and completely unsustainable. Socialised healthcare encourages bad decisions through subsidising the cost of ailments relating to poor lifestyle decisions. Socialised healthcare discourages good decisions through forcing healthy people to pay for other peoples poor lifestyle choices.

The majority of people do care about the poor, the disabled and the vulnerable and would willingly voluntarily donate to make sure that healthcare will be available to those in need. We have to back away from using violence to solve problems.

Hopefully people one day will realise that violence is universally bad, in the same way that slavery is universally bad. We need to.