Under-the-bus Instructions

I do not like making personal attacks anywhere but inside my head but it is this point that will lead you to accept that at the moment my head is full of the worst possible names for a certain MEP, a man with a bucket full of axes to grind and no way of doing it than through clever, swinging-in-the-wind, rhetoric. The lies about the NHS put about by vested financial interests in the US are the worst kind of class-warfare I have seen for a long time. Comments like "I have never used the NHS and would like a refund." are patently absurd - even if you went around with that tattooed on your forehead, all NHS medical staff without fail would still pick you up from the gutter and do what was necessary to patch you up. Of course the NHS could be improved but so could any health care system. Without skillful management, administration always swallows up more than its fair share of resources. I imagine that the problem we have in the UK is that while the medical staff are highly trained, the admin staff are not really ingrained with the plain attention to detail that is required to be a doctor or nurse. Emptying the front line NHS of frivolous demands will go some way to freeing up resources for the people who really need it. The NHS is a brilliant but flawed icon. I support it and I hate to see it used a punch ball for the medical equivalents of the financial experts who still seem to be in charge at the moment.