NHS Crisis. Are you willing to pay more in tax?

Nope. I work for the NHS, have done for 24 years. The amount of waste and incompetence is staggering - a whole corridor of Change and Innovation Managers for example, on senior manager salaries - so until they make it more efficient and accountable then no, I wouldn't be happy to pay any more into it.

I've recently left the NHS because I couldn't stand seeing the sheer waste, incompetence and mismanagement that I witnessed on a daily basis.

Throwing more money at it won't solve the problems.

Part of the problem is just the sheer size of the NHS and the pots of funding which means each department just cares about their own budgets and no one else's just as long as it doesn't impact on them. It results in lots of inefficiencies and waste including referring patients to endless specialities even if the problem is quite simple.

happy to pay similar to, say, france

but how about we cut back on other stuff first?

nhs as a top priority

nhs was shit in the 80s

If I thought for one minute that chucking another £1billion or £10 billion at the NHS would fix it then I would 100% support that no problems at all.

However let's be honest with ourselves. What would REALLY happen?

Well I'm old enough to remember back when the NHS during the Thatcher years. It did it's job. Of course back then you heard all about the fact the NHS was underfunded, it was in crisis and Tony Blair famously in 1997 declared there was only 24 hours left to save the NHS.

Under Labour NHS budgets TREBLED by 2008. We even threw £46 BILLION at a new IT system. The results of which I can't really see....can you? I mean I can book an appointment online now. Woo! That's value then!

So....after tripling the NHS budget what do we now have? Oh yes. Cries of our NHS is in crisis, it's underfunded etc etc. Sounds familiar?

The NHS needs to do better with the money it has. That means less bureaucracy, less managers, less targets (which need bureaucrats to administer) and someone desperately needs to sort out the PFI scandal.

Otherwise all we're doing is throwing good money into a deep black hole.

Of course this narrative doesn't fit into soundbites most people need it distilled into so it's simpler and sounds politically better to just say "Vote for me and I'll spend more money on the NHS!"

That's a soundbite that's a votewinner. I mean the public love it and NHS staff love it too as it means more money with no condition.

Sorry the reality doesn't work like that.

I'd rather see the NHS run efficiently than just throw more money without sorting the problems that are (very obviously) there. I'd also like to see a re distribution of tax revenue.

For the NHS, yes. It is very much underfunded, there are some efficiencies that could be made, certainly in terms of allowing private companies to profit from it, but not enough to bring it up to bring it up to adequate funding.

It's not how much you put IN yo the system but what you get OUT that counts.

How do we know it needs more money? have we considered that it actually gets sufficient money but chooses to spend it unwisely on things like agency fees for bank nurses, flying in GOs from other countries for weekend shifts, failed computer systems, ridiculous specimens of modern art (or clock that no one can read in the new Southmead hospital)

No, I don't want to give more in tax to perpetuate nonsense like that.

And if it does indeed need more money then we should use the £1.7 billion additional money we are giving to the EU or the £1.6 billion that we send to countries that have space programs or the £17 million we give to South Africa so I can spend £16.5 million on its presidential palace.

We need to scrutinise and prioritise our spending