BBC – Please Start A Root And Branch NHS Debate

Your report today on the NHS and how it disgracefully betrayed Ron Roberts is just the latest in a seemingly daily stream of evidence showing how the NHS doesn’t work, will never work, and has never worked.

The most amazing thing about your NHS coverage (and of the British media in general) is how the elephant in the room is ignored. The evidence is overwhelming, and yet the obvious point is never discussed. The NHS is a failure; but the obvious point desperately clamouring to be heard - how can we deliver world class healthcare to the British - is never discussed.

John Humphrys today clearly shared Mr Roberts’ relative’s disgust about how he was treated. He listened to the smug, arrogance of the Professor from Strathclyde University, saying he believed in the NHS, despite being buried in evidence to the contrary. And yet Humphrys never asked this obvious question.

Could you, as editor of this important daily programme, initiate a debate on how health care can be improved. Why not despatch your reporters to France, Germany and the U.S. to find out what happens there and what lessons we can learn? When you interview Labour party ministers, when they inevitably try and bury the argument by saying things like “the Tories want to nationalise health care” can you make them answer the simple question “what actually needs to be done to deliver better health care”. The Tories can’t be trusted to pursue health care reform because Cameroons fear they will lose this argument with Labour purely because of pernicious way the left looks at healthcare. The left refuses to discuss root and branch reform because it is ideologically attached to state provision, no matter how outrageous the failures of delivery becomes.

When you brief your reporters on this assignment, can you make sure they attack it from this angle. Forget any notions that Britain has a world-class healthcare system which is the envy of the world. This isn’t the case and never was. It is a classic British failure of avoidance of reality. Can you please bring some realism to the debate and give us all the chance of making some progress.  

April 21, 2007

 Guess what. No reply from the Today Show editor. These people’s arrogance is too much - Neil