Looking under the weather, lighting up on the radar

As the Lib Dems are convulsed by whether to support the Health and Social Care Bill making its tortuous path through parliament, public support has eroded faster than a cliff prone to subsidence and political capital is being washed into the sea.  I think everyone recognises that the NHS needs reform to meet the coming challenges of the near-future with an ageing population.  But after adopting a wait-and-see policy, given that I’m a generally optimistic guy who believes that people muddle through in the end, the steady drip-drip of division and ominous warnings of irreparable damage have swayed me against it.  Having only a cursory knowledge of the internal workings of the NHS, I was content to leave it in the hands of ‘experts’ who you would hope would be acting in the general interests of society yet after the ideological captives of New Labour, who saddled the country with the mortgages of public-private partnership Foundation Hospitals, whose future costs were conveniently off-balance sheet, it appears dogma cannot be detached from such an emotional subject (small mercies that the Conservative Party did not have a parliamentary majority to push through a more radical/threatening overhaul).

I was never enthralled by the prospect of local General Practitioners having control over the purse strings of the health budget – one of the main planks of the Bill.  Aside from plonking an extra dose of paperwork on the surgeries for no increase in numbers, my GP is kindly but myself and my wife have little confidence in his medical abilities.  I have had troubles with my sinuses my whole life.  When as a teenager we enquired of this, he diagnosed with nervous asthma and prescribed me an inhaler (which I never had cause to use).  This line of enquiry petered out for a few more years, until we forced the issue that there had been no improvement.  I was given a hospital appointment and after the operation on my nose, the consultant told me I had incurable rhinitis (a form of sinusitis), that it was genetic and that I had a lactose intolerance.  It is impossible to judge the success of the operation since from that point I have generally avoided dairy products.  So much for nervous asthma.  My wife was suffering from a skin rash on her back and the GP gave her a moisturising lotion, even though it was not from dry skin she was suffering but some sort of allergy.  Predictably, the prescription had no effect.  When the GP was not present for some reason, my wife was seen by a locum who prescribed her a lotion which specifically tackled the rash and it cleared up.  I wouldn’t say my GP is incompetent as all GPs do a lot of guesswork with patients who come to see them, but it would be fair to say he is not one of the leading lights of his profession.  To take responsibility for money as well seems a gamble at best.