This is the second in a series of posts on the politics of Nigel Farage and Reform, all of which treat the two as effectively synonymous, as history has proven that to be the right thing to do.
Each post asks the same question - Why vote for reform? - within a different context.
A summary of all the posts to date is provided at the end of the post.
Each post is also appearing on YouTube and other social media platforms.
Farage and the NHS
Nigel Farage has openly said he wants to scrap the NHS and replace it with an insurance-based system. That means a two-tier or even three-tier Britain: the rich buy the best cover, others get a second-rate service, and millions will be priced out altogether, dependent on a decidedly third-rate service, if they are lucky to get even that. And meanwhile, the tax cuts Farage wants will almost certainly go mainly to the rich. Why would anyone vote for Reform in that case?
This is the transcript:
Why would anyone vote for Reform?
Let's be clear. Nigel Farage wants to end the NHS. He's already talked about replacing it with an insurance-based healthcare system. He loathes what we have.
He describes it as wasteful, and the consequence of what he is saying is that we will end up with a two or maybe three-tier system of healthcare in the UK.
What's going to happen? The rich will get the best insurance to buy the best service .
Most other people will buy some form of insurance product because they will have no choice. But remember, that doesn't necessarily mean that their taxes will fall. So you'll be paying extra for something you already have, and dentistry shows the way in which that goes.
And then there will be millions who will be priced out of healthcare altogether.
This has happened in the USA. Around a quarter of all people in the USA do not have healthcare insurance. They get a very basic service from the state. They get what is left over after everybody else has been supplied, whether they need it or not, in a great many cases, because in the USA, healthcare goes to those who are wealthy.
Health inequality will grow fast as a result of what Farage wants. Those who are poorest in the UK will get weaker as a consequence. Society will be divided by wealth and health, and that is unfair.
So why would you vote for Reform when it wants to end the NHS?
Why would you vote for Reform when it wants to create a two or three-class health system for this country?
Why would you do that, most particularly if you are one of those who are going to have difficulty making payments of healthcare insurance?
Your health should not depend on your wealth. For almost everybody alive in the UK now, they can only remember an NHS that has been free at the point of delivery.
But get your heads around this, that's not what Farage wants. He wants you to pay. He's acting in the interests of the health companies and the big pharmaceutical companies, but he's certainly not acting in your interests.
Nigel Farage doesn't want an NHS. He wants you to be ill and pay for it.
Previous posts in this series
Taking further action
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We really need to learn from Brexit and the 2024 USA election.
Somehow the public thought Brexit and Project 2025 would not be as bad as the detractors were saying.
We really need to go “on and on and Ariston” about what will happen.
And we need to show that it WILL happen.
Endlessly. Everywhere.
We need to be sure no one can say “we didn’t think it would be like this!” like they now are about Brexit because David Cameron did not put the Remain case strongly enough.
And we have one tool we did not have with Brexit.
Reform will have been in control in many councils and two Mayoralties.
We need to hammer on and on about every bad decision that is made.
We need to demolish the argument that got Labour in – that they could not be worse than the Tories.
They are!!
And Reform would be MUCH worse.
Remember the Brexit vote. Remember the mistakes the Democrats made in 2024.
And above everything else – come together behind a positive vision for the future, that people can easily understand and support over Reform.
(I have hope that Zack Polanski could be at the heart of that vision….)
The NHS is not perfect and perhaps we could try to look at and learn lessons from other health systems in other large developed nations.
We should run away from the dysfunctional health market in the US. It is expensive and gives outcomes that are poor value for money. You can get good care but only if you can afford it. And many people get atrocious or no care.
But how do France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Denmark, Australia, Canada, Japan, etc do it. Are their outcomes better or worse than the UK?
Perhaps we should be asking those who can afford it to pay more, whether that is tax or insurance premiums or something else, so there is enough funding to provide better services to everyone else.
They are all much more expensive than the UK.
Outcomes are not necssarily much better, and sometimes worse.
There are money sites and much research comparing systems.
Please remember, there is no NHS UK. NHS England and NHS Scotland are quite separate and differently organised. Detailed analysis of costs and outcomes in England and Scotland would be make interesting reading.
One little fact from Public Health Scotland: 95.4% of the Scottish population were registered with an NHS dentist as at 30 September 2022. Meanwhile, the Consumers Association magazine Which? currently has an article making no reference to Scotland and almost exclusively about private dentists in England; it starts: “As fewer people can access NHS dentists . . .”
Noted
This is not a bash Scotland message, but I would like to question that statistic. I have been trying for 2 years to get registered with NHS Dentistry and I have got nowhere. 1 local dentist offers the carrot that, if you sign up for Denplan, they will register your kids on an NHS plan. I can’t contradict the figure of 95.4%, as I don’t have access to a formal questionnaire. In a straw poll locally, however, of 10 people questioned, 2 were on NHS deals, 3 had private plans and 5 had no dental cover.
Wales has a separate NHS too.
A couple of days after we arrived here in North Wales I became ill. I started vomiting profusely (sorry) and hallucinating (some very strange hallucinations too! Quite entertaining in some ways!). When I threw up what looked like blood, John decided it was time to try and see a doctor.
The GP had no appointments and wasn’t interested. John tried ringing round various other people, nobody would help us. Because we live in England, we don’t live in Wales.
By 5pm he ended up calling 999. We were put through to someone who assessed my symptoms thoroughly. They were very kind, listened, and said I needed to go to hospital straight away. They apologised that there wasn’t an ambulance near us, and it would be best for John to drive me to hospital immediately. Which he did.
The queues at the hospital were huge, but everyone was very kind. In the end they decided to admit me overnight, and John went back to the caravan to sleep, returning the next morning. I had a bed to sleep on in A&E. After seeing a doctor the next day, I was discharged with a diagnosis of “You probably had a stomach upset”.
So if you don’t actually live in Wales, I suggest it’s not a good idea to get sick in Wales.
My Mother was Welsh, and I loved Wales since childhood. I still love Wales, but not it’s so-called “Health Service”.
Noted
Andrew, there’s more than one NHS in the UK. I don’t know much about NHS Wales or N Ireland, but NHS Scotland is managed very differently than in England and consistently out-performs the English model (although you’d never know that if you get your news from the UK media). For accurate info on NHS Scotland and other data check out Talking-up Scotland. One thing is absolutely clear regardless of which NHS organisation applies in your area: If we allow it to be undermined and replaced with any “pay-as-you-go” system, we’ll never be able to reinstate the “free-at-point-of-delivery” system
Agreed
I originally come from a country with Bismarck style insurance based system (for health and pensions). First it has to be noted that it has nothing to do with US-style insurance system. Everyone is insured. Certain percentage of wages goes into the health pot and certain into the pension pot. Family members living in the same household with this ‘paying’ person will be insured via this person. Everyone under 18 and students usually under 26 will be insured by default. Everyone receiving a pension will be insured by default. State or local authorities will be paying for homeless or unemployed people. It was like this even in socialist Central European countries pre-1990.
So – in the end everyone with residency’s insured one way or another . But this does cause (unnecessary) bureaucratic costs as all this has to be filed and the whole system run. On the other hand it is more independent from the day to day politics as health (or pensions) aren’t financed from the general budget pot.
Someone further down asked why are these countries going on with this Bismarck-style systems if Beveridge-style system (which would be NHS) is better? I’d say it’s mostly tradition. That’s how things have been done there for decades and decades. And as they do function, why change them?
That being said – I’m very much against England, Scotland, Wales and NI adopting the Bismarck-style insurance health system. Why? Because in UK it would be just a stepping stone towards complete americanisation of the health system. We know that that is the end-game of practically everyone who’s talking about insurance-based system.
Thanks
And I agree with your conclusion, entirely
In 2011 I think it was, the OECD did a health satisfaction survey across member countries and the NHS came top. But that had taken raised investment year after year from 2000 to rebuild it after the years of Conservative rule- had run it into the ground – ie just as it is now.
It needs proper funding – so as employing the thousands of recently qualified doctors who are currently unemployed. GP’s are short of doctors, and there are not enough hospital training places. @wesstreeting has been told this – but of course Reeves ‘has no money’ – even though it would pay for itself as well as helping the country ‘get back to work’.
We could argue with Farage and Reform on healthcare quite successfully by simply stating: It doesn’t work for the UK because the costs of running it would also have to include a large element of profit for service providers. Present gov funding is arguably inadequate for providing a decent free service with nobody profiting from it. Why would a paid- for service be any better when it would not be free and would cost much more?
Regrettably a growing % of the NHS is now profit making do to outsourcing to the private sector. Check out the ambulance service – largely private now, ditto pathology services, cataract surgery etc etc. And that is before mentioning the disastrous PFI. Alan Milburn was one architect of the model and is back in charge. It’s one of the reasons that the NHS is short of money to spend on providing health care.
“What did the NHS ever do for me?”
It offered maternity care to my mum in one of the best public maternity hospitals in the country when her booked private maternity home let her down when I arrived early.
It gave me 18 years of top class maxillo facial and orthodontic care, similarly my son. It delivered both my children. It delivered my wife. It provided her a lifetime’s care for chronic auto-immune diseases plus several joint replacements. It offered my son emergency and long term care for epilepsy, and picked up the pieces from his alcohol addiction.
It saw us all through a variety of A&E visits.
I cannot imagine how expensively all this would have worked out under Farage’s “insurance based” system, I just know we couldn’t have afforded it.
My family would not have been paying taxes, or contributing to society – we would either be bankrupt or dead, and costing society much more along the way.
Do you have an NHS story? Tell it to a Reform supporter and ask them to tell you theirs. Ask if they know anyone in the UK bankrupted or homeless because of health bills.
Thanks
Not that those commenting on the video would agree, it seems.
Wow, that’s interesting that those commenting on the video disagreed. I wonder why that was.
I have a story from the US (Cambridge Mass) about healthcare, from 1962. I was walking home about 2am, after taking books back to the library. I felt I was being followed, and just before I got home I was grabbed from behind. I screamed and wriggled; the assailant ran off. I called the police; they drove me round looking for blacks on the street, saying “Was it him” when one was found. I said no. Then I realised I had been stabbed, in the back, bleeding. The cops told me I could wait for the hospital for which I was insured to open at 9am, or go to a paying hospital. I chose the latter, was stitched up, paid amount that was about 5% of my total income, recovered. Never forgotten. But people in the UK simply find it hard to believe that this could apply here, if we lost the NHS.
Thanks
Glad you recovered.
The other thing to do is ask yourself is what makes you think that this well off gentlemen and his well off mates actually give a damn about you at all?
They don’t care if he cares about them.
They only care that he hates people of colour and wants to be rid of them.
I doubt Farage has the answer to the NHS – but even a stopped clock is right twice a day.
I’m afraid the NHS is utterly, utterly, broken. They could not even offer proper trauma care to my son. Yes, in the immediate aftermath of a serious accident, they got it right. But thereafter it all went horribly wrong. Fortunately, he has health insurance with his job, otherwise, and I’m not exaggerating, he could have lost his leg. This is not the only incidence of such failure in the family.
Following this we have, reluctantly, bought health insurance because we cannot be sure of even urgent care.
We don’t live in a backwater but near a major teaching hospital.
Like you, I have numerous members of the family and friends who are doctors, so I probably have the same access to what is happening in the NHS as you. Of course they do get things right, with lots of dedicated, good staff. But systematically and organisationally they also get a lot wrong.
Unless we look at what is going wrong and are prepared to discuss it we leave politicians like Farage a clear field for their nostrums. He is at least prepared to discuss it. The main parties try to pretend that all is well, or at least that under their tender care it will soon all be well – it won’t. We are falling into the trap that led to the Democrats lossing against Trump. We need to provide positive solution policies not merely demonise Farage.
I a disagree with you.
The NHS did not get things wrong. Politicians who refused to provide the resources a to get the treatment right got things wrong.
Your are blaming the wrong people. And that annoys me and plays straight into Farage’s hands.
I agree that the NHS is broken because it has been starved of resources. Blame should go to the politicians who starved it. I have previously said that the fundamental problem is neoliberalism, which leads to the austerity delusion. I hope we agree on that.
I certainly don’t blame the vast majority of NHS staff. They are my friends and family. They are good people doing their best in a sometimes impossible situation. Then they do get blamed when something, inevitably, goes wrong. That is not just.
But the NHS is still broken. That seems undisputable regardless of who is to blame.
What I’m saying is that it is not sufficient to simply demonise Farage and his ilk. What most people see, who have less direct insight into the system, is a broken system. Yes, sometimes it provides an excellent service, but too often not. And people see that. And they are looking for someone who admits that, and who, they hope, can provide a solution.
If we wish to protect a functioning health service we must provide a positive narrative of what can be done. First off is to debunk neoliberalism, on which you are doing a great job (many thanks). People need a narrative that we can fund a well functioning heath service (as I believe we can). Few politicians are even addressing the issue in a realistic way.
And once that core narrative has been established we do, I think, need some discussion on how best to provide a good health service for everyone. It seems to me that starving the NHS of resources itself leads to further inefficiency. It’s a negative spiral. I don’t see that we can simply say we’ll throw more resources at it. Of course it needs more resources. But that is not enough. It does, as every other organisation does, need to change. That’s what most politicians are avoiding. That’s what Farage is addressing even though he’s wrong. That’s what makes him so dangerous.
Actually, it dies not need to change. It needs to be allowed to be the NhS. The problem is that for 30 years or more it has been claimed to be a market.
Which companies provide and insure a local UK network for 24/7 Accident & Emergency care, outside the under-resourced NHS? I havent come across them.
They don’t exist.
Nor does the private sector want to know about old people who are ‘off their legs’ as medics put it.
And there is no money in care for children in most cases.
Or much for deep mental ill health, except for the very wealthy.
The private sector likes broken bones and physical failure requiring operations, and the worried well, in other words. That is not most medical need.
A little late, but perhaps this might be more snappy:
“voting Reform could cost your family £20,000 per year in health care costs”
https://www.forbes.com/advisor/health-insurance/how-much-does-health-insurance-cost/
So all the employers in the UK, your employees will need health insurance and your employees cost will go up at lease 20% to ensure heathy workers. That will make all your exports too expensive to export.
The American solution was to move all manufaction to China and fire all the workers.
“So why would you vote for Reform when it wants to end the NHS?”
Because Fart-rage & co are good at telling stories which appeal to emotions & because the Uk meeja are unable (unwilling?) to attempt any substantive examination or questioning of fart-rage and his minions.
AND
Because the imbeciles in Wezzie (McSweeney & co) are incapable of mounting any sort of response or narrative.
Opposition to fart-rage needs stories (from politicos) and questioning (by the media) – neither are even on the horizon (BBC? – self-satisfied upper-middle class morons that have never had to strive in their entire life).
Thank you Mike Parr.
That is what I have been trying to say.
I grew up in the UK, but the system in the European country where I now live is insuranced-based and seems to be a bit better than the UK. So I think it depends on the details – of course we don’t want an American style system.
Germany, France, Benelux, Austria, Switzerland, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Slovenia, Poland, Croatia, Romania, Bulgaria and the Baltic states all have insurance-based systems.
Where I live there are a handful of insurance companies, but insurance premiums are collected from your salary automatically (so it’s more like a hypothecated tax). If you’re not working and don’t pay (e.g. if you are living from your investments in retirement or are homeless), you still get treated (and always would get treated), but you would accumulate a debt to the state insurance system which they may try to recover. When I retire in a few years time, I will be paying roughly £100 per month for this insurance.
The system is highly regulated, so it’s always free at point-of-use (except that there is a *small* fee for some prescriptions – not for all: it depends on the medicine).
Was tax cut as a result?
If not, why would someone vote for this in te UK?
And what about the unwaged? How would a pensioner of the state OAP in the UK pay £100 a month?
And if a payment is mandatory and deducted from pay, why not just better fund the NHS?
None of the alternatives make any sense so long as the market is stripped out of the NHS.
All good questions, but I think it’s fair to ask why so many states in Europe prefer an insurance model: could it be more efficient?
So my statement about me paying £100 a month was misleading. I’m lucky in that I can retire before state pension age. Those above state pension age pay nothing for health insurance: the state pays it for them.
So, why involve all the admin of the private sector, utterly unnecessarily. How can that be efficient? And if children are free (and I presume they are) and so are OAPs and they make up the vast majority of use, why just use the cover of private sector involvement to disguise what is tax imooised for the private gain of a few? It’s all a scam. And, incidentally, most of these systems are grossly inefficient because they focus on specilaties and sideline GPs at major cost.
I don’t usually share personal details on any blog, but in this case I feel it is important. My wife, who had been ill for many years with Alzheimer’s Disease, became very unwell last month. She was revived by paramedics, and then I was given a choice. Either have her admitted to a hospital/hospice, or have her taken care at home by a service operated by our health service, called Hospital at Home, where she would receive the same attention as if she were in a hospital. I chose the latter, and she was attended to every day by a doctor and nurse until she died earlier this month. The service provided by the S.N.H.S from first to last was exceptional. While no health service is perfect, I dread to think what it would be like if the odious Farage, and his acolytes, ever came to power.
First, Aloex I am so sorry for your loss. My real sympathies.
Second, I am glad you got the care your wide needed.
Please now look aftyer yourself. And let yourself grieve. There is no shame in it.
Alex,
Condolences for your loss.
Thank you for mentioning Hospital at Home – I had never heard of that. My Mum has been in hospital for more than 75 days since May over 4 separate visits. Each time she comes home, she seems to have got an infection during her stay in hospital, and then has to go back in to get it treated. Hospital at Home sounds like a possible way of avoiding the hospital and decreasing the chance of further infections. I will try and see if it is a service offered here.
Good luck
Did you know that your generously & voluntarily given blood is sold at cost to private hospitals which is effectively a subsidy. I have no problem with private patients receiving such blood. But I do have a real problem with them not paying a commercial price for it – which would help fund the NHS.
What has the NHS done for me?
Well as a Type 1 Diabetic since the age of 15 and I am now 38 it provides me with 3 different types of live saving insulin, test strips, monitors so i can check my blood sugar on my phone and excellent health care professionals in Hospital settings..
The Hospital are being ingnored and even the John Radcliffe and ChurchHill Hospitals are going to ruin in Oxford..
Under farage’s and the US model i would be bankrupting myself and selling my house to live under a bridge to pay for insulin which they charge an absolute fortune for!
NHS is not perfect but it is essential and we need to protect it.
No human construct is perfect.
The NHS is not at present.
But, we know how to make it work. It’ not rocket science. So, why aren’t we funding it?
Because just about the whole of the labour front bench are funded by private health companies, Streeting more than most.
https://northeastbylines.co.uk/news/health/reforms-plans-for-the-nhs-what-would-a-french-healthcare-model-look-like/
People are trying to fight for the NHS. I follow Call to Action and EveryDoctor, both organised by Julia Patterson, who was a GP herself.
At 12.30 today there is a webinar by weownit.org.uk where the NHS is bound to be mentioned. Cat of weownit fame always used to say she was not political. People are now saying she is getting more political, especially on substack or facebook. The people saying that are obviously reform.
We are all political.
We just need not be party political .
This is legally recognised e.g. in charity law.
Streeting, prompted by Milburn, is attempting to cut £25bn out of the NHS funding through savings. “Doing more with less” is the mantra.
Lino are saying that the UK must pay more for drugs because the big pharma companies are complaining about not making big, big profits and LINO not giving them big enough financial bungs and threatening to go elsewhere.
The NHS is not a business, it does not charge for its services.
Since Thatcher the aim has been to make the NHS run like a business, with what appears to be a built in bias to make the NHS fail. Somehow the NHS has held on.
None of the UK politicians are capable of saying, lets cut out the profit centre mantra with all that run like a business crap. Let’s fund it properly and make it work.
Otherwise the NHS goes the insurance system route. I expect close on 90% of the UK population will be on the UK equivalent of Medicaid and Medicare and in deep future health shit.
The time I noticed a BIG change (chaos, bureacracy, admin inefficiency, wrong appointments) was the introduction of the NHS “infernal market” in the early 1990s.
Community (lack of) Care Act 1990.
The stress involved for our family is difficult to forgive as a multidisciplinary “one local hospital/combined appointment” approach was replaced by a multi-hospital, multi-county, competing appointments, competing disciplines, appointments on days that didnt exist, total chaos where surgeons discussed budget issues with patients and ignored other specialities. The scars run deep!
Correct
Jacqueline did the same
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