As it happens I'm writing this in hospital. Not as an inpatient or even an outpatient, thankfully, but I've spent too long in NHS hospitals over the last several years to know them inside out.
I am grateful for the NHS and know most people working there are simply trying to do their best. I am not so stupid as to think they are all angels though. I've seen some shocking incompetence and cruelty over the years to know that there are some bad apples.
No organisation is perfect, all have their own share of wrong 'uns.
What really depresses me is the incompetent way labour has used the NHS for their own party political purposes.
I'm sickened by the waste labour's policies have led to.
Today the £11-16 billion NHS computer system is going to be scrapped.
Scrapped because it has never worked and is massively over budget.
You'd have thought that the minimum you'd have got from making labour supporting companies incredibility rich is something that works a little bit. However as anyone who has witnessed medical professionals try to use this super new White elephant and fail knows the new system was pants.
It didn't bloody work.
Worse than that it used obsolete technology and rubbish proprietary software rather than efficient, and free, open source software.
This IT project is years late, massively over budget, and doesn't work.
So labour have pissed away up to £16 billion for no reason. They have fallen into the grasping hands of computer snake oil salesmen who bought access to labour, gave them cash, and jobs, and squandered billions.
However it gets worse.
As I've written here previously Gordon Brown decided in his infinite 'wisdom' that it was a good idea to use PFI to buy hospitals. This was the more expensive and risky way of funding new hospitals, schools, etc., but it gave Brown one unique and special thing.
It allowed him to con the public by keeping the billions spent off the books. This is what Enron did. It was a crime when they did so.
But Brown used the same dishonest trick to pretend that he was 'prudent' when he was behaving like an incontinent drunk pissed on someone else's dime.
That fact that such PFI schemes were much more expensive to the paying public didn't concern Brown. It allowed him to obtain political advantage by being able to have his photo taken in front of gleaming new hospitals and still brag about prudence.
It was a con. And like all cons it's come back to bite the victim. Unfortunately it is the public who are the victims here.
It now emerges that sixty hospitals are under
threat because their hospital trusts cannot afford the PFI payments due under the incompetent contracts signed by Brown.
And so labour have wasted over £20 billion.
Wasted.
Wasted because the money could have have been much better used elsewhere in the NHS, and wasted because it's cost the taxpayer much more because of the iffy accounting tricks used by Brown and Blair in order to secure electoral advantage.
This is a scandal. The sheer amount of cash is beyond comprehension. However all you need to understand is that labour's actions have killed people and will kill many more over the years.
It really is that simple. The twenty billion wasted is twenty billion cut from patient care. Each penny wasted means the ill are denied drugs or care that would save their lives. Treatment that would have saved lives is denied in order to pay the billions spent by labour on useless schemes.
People have died in order to win labour votes.
And it worked. It did secure the votes and many labour types have made a fortune out of IT and PFI companies.
It's disgusting.
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