Save the NHS from the Tory Butchers: How Doctors Saved Me and My Family, and How People Forget That Insurers Don’t Cover Pre-Existing Conditions | Andy Worthington (original) (raw)
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Exactly five years ago, I was hospitalised — with what turned out to be a blood disease that, manifesting itself via a blood clot, had cut off the blood supply to two of my toes to such an extent that they had turned black, and it was debatable whether they could be saved.
I had first started feeling significant pain in my right foot in the New Year, but had tried to ignore it, both on my US trip in January, to call for the closure of Guantánamo, and on a visit to Poland, at the start of February, on a short tour of “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo,” the documentary film I co-directed with filmmaker Polly Nash. By the middle of February, however, the pain was so severe that, for a month, I barely slept. Every time I fell asleep, I awoke in blinding agony within just a few minutes. All day and all night, every day and night, this sleep deprivation — ironic for a campaigner against torture, including sleep deprivation — continued without any relief.
I couldn’t get doctors to give me the pain relief I needed, and it took a month until consultants in south east London, where I live, accepted that my situation was so bad that I had to be brought into hospital, to finally be given the morphine that I had needed all along. However, it soon became clear that the hospital I was at had no real plan for what to do with me, so my wife, fortunately, and with my eternal gratitude, pushed for me to be moved to St. Thomas’s, opposite the Houses of Parliament (another irony, surely), where I stayed for a week and half, where some excellent doctors found medication that saved my toes, and where the staff allowed me, like some sort of quietly doped-up maniac, to find the one corner of the ward where I could get wi-fi reception, so that, ridiculously, I could continue working.
Those articles, if you’re interested, are here, here, here and here (cross-posts plus some of my own commentary), plus Syria: Amazingly, The Next Crucible of Revolution in the Middle East? and Political Prisoners in Syria: An Urgent Crisis Now!, my reporting on the earliest stages of Syria’s civil war, On the Anti-Cuts Protest in London, 500,000 Say No to the Coalition Government’s Arrogant, Ideological Butchery of the British State, my report on the 500,000-strong march against the Tories and the austerity programme, which I watched from my hospital window, and Intimations of Mortality — And Why This Is the View From My Bedroom, my confessional article about my illness.
I’m revisiting my illness five years ago not primarily for reasons of self-obsession, but because it remains hugely significant to me that I was looked after by consultants, doctors and nurses working for the NHS; that’s the National Health Service, an organisation that, I have always found, draws people to it because they understand the ethos of working for the common good — for a service that is a business, not a business that provides a service.
As the Tories continue to try to destroy the NHS, having opened the floodgates to private healthcare companies, it’s important to me on this anniversary to sound a few alarms — primarily about how, without being challenged in way that has not yet happened, the Tories will be content to let the NHS fail, as they don’t care about how many people’s health that affects, or how many people die, because they have only one intention: to do away with the existing model, a health service funded through general taxation, and to replace it with a private, insurance-funded system instead — one with the promise of endless profits for the Tories and their cronies, and, of course, the exclusion of the poor.
Please don’t think I’m scaremongering. The Tories are absolutely, obsessively committed to destroying the state provision of almost all services, with a handful of exceptions, including, funnily enough, their own salaries and bloated expenses. Their obsession is a form of mental illness, but one from which they cannot be cured. To save the NHS, they must be removed from power, or have their minds forcibly changed — and I don’t mean for a moment to suggest that saving the NHS, or saving everything else they have their sights on (our schools, for example, and much of the welfare state) can be accomplished by sitting back and waiting for the next General Election in 2020.
Make of that what you will, but bear in mind that my anger at the Tories, and my love of the NHS, comes not only from how the NHS saved me five years ago — and how the blood specialists who have looked after me ever since, at St. Thomas’s sister hospital, Guy’s, have persistently exemplified the same dedicated service as I received in 2011, conducting world-class research while providing a service for everyone, not just those with money.
My anger at the Tories, and my love of the NHS is also derived from how my wife and son’s lives were saved by other consultants, doctors and nurses, at King’s College Hospital, in 1999, when my son was born ten weeks prematurely, and, over the course of the next seven weeks, until he could come home with us, I saw first-hand how the most incredibly dedicated medical personnel provided superb care for every baby in their care — and their distraught parents — and, again, without any regard whatsoever for whether those suffering had money or not.
For roughly half the cost of the US system, made fat on the huge profits of healthcare companies, the NHS, via general taxation, provides a world-class service that excludes no one, and, moreover, doesn’t deal with endemic discrimination and favouritism based on wealth. Both Gordon Brown and David Cameron had reasons to thank the NHS when they had severely ill babies, and while we were in King’s those who must have been thankful that they were able to avail themselves of such dedicated care included a woman from Zimbabwe and a very young woman from the Aylesbury Estate in nearly Walworth.
Crucially, in a system based on taxation, no one asks you when you arrive, critically ill, how you intend to pay for your healthcare, and, when you leave, no one asks you for payment either. For anyone who gets ill in a system dominated by insurance and payments, the stress for those who aren’t fabulously wealthy is immense, and the removal of that stress the single most important thing that society as a whole can provide.
That’s no exaggeration. If you’ve never been ill, then you should know how lucky you are, but you should also know that, young or old, illness — whether mild or catastrophic — can strike any of us at any time, and if, like me, you end up with a rare blood disease, an insurance-based system will have no interest in you. Those with pre-existing health conditions are cared for by the NHS, but will be locked out — or made to pay massively, for life — in the Tories’ vision of the US system.
So if you care, please fight back — and fight back now. It will be too late to whinge if the NHS is destroyed, and I will derive no pleasure from saying I told you so. Act now. Get rid of the Tories (and Labour’s Blairites who are no better), and save our beloved NHS!
Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer, film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose debut album, ‘Love and War,’ is available for download or on CD via Bandcamp — also see here). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (and the Countdown to Close Guantánamo initiative, launched in January 2016), the co-director of We Stand With Shaker, which called for the release from Guantánamo of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison (finally freed on October 30, 2015), and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by the University of Chicago Press in the US, and available from Amazon, including a Kindle edition — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here — or here for the US).
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