If we lose our NHS illness will become a mortal terror for the poor once again

A letter a day to number 10. No 1,235

Monday 19 October 2015.

Dear Mr Cameron,

Research by Credit Suisse reveals that the top 1% of the worlds population now owns over 50% of all household wealth whilst the bottom 50% owns just 1%. The pace of global inequality is such that this situation has arisen a year earlier than predicted and in Britain inequality is dramatically increasing.

Total global military expenditure for 2014 was $1.8 trillion and Britain’s share of that was in excess of £60 billion ($92.6 billion). We can afford to kill people but not save them.

Poverty is violence, it is wilful, extreme, violence with 22,000 children dying of poverty across the globe every single day, that’s over 8 million a year and that’s just the children. Poverty is the silent killer, largely ignored and seldom newsworthy, and I wonder when might be the time to call it genocide? We could afford to bail out the banks and the media and government laud extreme wealth as if it is some kind of personal virtue whilst millions silently die of poverty and disease.

As Jeremy Hunt continues in his destabilising of our NHS for privatisation and moves us every closer to a US insurance system which you are in favour of, the reality is that, as in the US, the poorest people will be abandoned. It’s all about profiteering and nothing to do with actual health care. Dr Jo Kirkcaldy wrote on 13 October: “Dear NHS, it is you who now keeps me awake at night. It is you that I want to be able to save because you do so much for all of us even though we don’t always acknowledge or recognise it. I love that you are indiscriminate in your care, providing for the last, the least and the lost in exactly the same way as you do for the great and powerful. I know we’ll miss you when you’re gone and I fear for my family, friends and patients in a world without you. But, dear NHS, I’m running out of ideas as to how to save you and I know I can’t do it alone.”

The loss of universal health care will be catastrophic for the poorest people in society, just as in the days before the NHS people will die of preventable diseases, the clocks will be turned back over half a century. Illness and Disease will become things of terror once again. Health insurance will be a lottery, people will have to decide on their level of cover by what they can afford and if your policy doesn’t cover your illness, tough. Iain Duncan Smith claims that, ‘For those who are never able to work through disability or other problems, the state will step in.’ We’ve seen just how that will work through his current treatment of sick and disabled people, he’ll sanction them to incentivise them to get well. John Lennon summed it all up nicely in “Working Class Hero”, ‘There’s room at the top they are telling you still, but first you must learn how to smile as you kill, if you want to be like the folks on the hill’. And how you do all smile, it’s only poor people dying after all.

http://www.theguardian.com/money/2015/oct/13/half-world-wealth-in-hands-population-inequality-report