So you think you pay too much for the NHS? Think on...
Get politics updates directly to your inbox + Subscribe Thank you for subscribing! Could not subscribe, try again later Invalid Email
Lift your head and look around - across the room, out the window, beyond the door. What do you see?
A world that holds few dangers. Oh, there are knives and terrorists and burglars, but there's no smallpox for you. No polio. No putrid throat, no plague, and no terrifying bacteria who could claim your life after just a little scratch on the finger.
That's true of the entire developed world, at a cost. But if you're a Briton you're doubly blessed, because you get all that with one of the cheapest healthcare systems in the world. For a mere £2,069 a head we get inoculations, dental checks, midwives, cancer screening, AIDS drugs, brain scans, stitches, splints, blood tests, statins, and someone to put our faith in.
And most of us realise that, which is why a survey has found that most of us would happily pay more to make the National Health Service better still.
While our politicians persist in the belief the majority of us want to die sooner for less, 73% of us say we'd pay £1 a week more to raise £2.75billion. More than half would pay double that, a third would raise £13.75bn with a fiver a week, and 63% say they'd happily pay another 1% of income tax.
It's the 22% who think £52 a year is too much who worry me, and what worries me still more are the 5% who officially don't know. We all know someone like that, don't we? Someone who reads the headlines but not between the lines, dips in and out, had to wait in a telephone queue for an appointment at midwinter and thinks the whole thing's a mess.
So for the illumination of those struggling in the darkness of believing the NHS is out to get them, and the reassurance of the rest, this is why paying more for it is a great idea.
(Image: Getty Images)
According to independent health charity The King's Fund, we spent 6.3% of our GDP on health care in 2000. Then PM Tony Blair vowed to match European levels of spending, which at the time was 8.5%.
By 2009 we were spending 8.9% of our GDP on the NHS, but although we had narrowed the gap EU nations were spending more too, at 10.1%.
Then the financial crash happened, the Tory-led Coalition took power, and we began 8 years of austerity. Austerity was not just about paying off our debts - it was about spending less day-to-day, which means that while our GDP is predicted to increase by 15.2% by 2021, our overall contribution to the NHS is expected to be just 6.6% of GDP.
That's 6.6% - barely more than we were spending 18 years ago, even though since the turn of century we have developed crises in obesity, dementia and waiting times.
If you adjust those percentages to take into account the differences between how we and EU countries fund our healthcare, OECD data shows the UK is the 13th lowest spender on health out of 15 EU countries.
But that's not a clear indication of how little we currently pay to the NHS. Since 2010 when the Tories came to power overall health spending in the UK has fallen by an average of £12 a head - despite all the claims Cameron, Osborne, Hammond, May and That Dratted Hunt have made about giving us more, they are spending less on each of us.
In Scotland, which spent more per head to start with, costs have fallen by £51 a head, and perhaps some of the NHS problems in Wales can be explained by the fact they've cut things by £125 per person and that nation now spends less on health than every other part of the UK.
And in the USA, whose private insurance model is so often held up by Tories as one way of "relieving pressure" on the NHS, they spend 3 times as much per head and have one of the lowest life expectancies in the developed world. A hip replacement that costs £5,620 in the UK is £28,000 in the USA; a broken leg that sets us back £1,100 here would be £2,461 there; and a £5,000 birth with complications in the UK would cost you north of £20,000 across the pond.
Medical negligence is the third biggest killer in the US. Here, it's barely on the charts - deaths due to medical complications and surgical care are 55th in the league table after lightning, poisons and wasps. WASPS.
We pay very little for our NHS. And, many would argue, you get what you pay for.
We are paying the same as we did two decades ago, and just as we did then we're queueing more. It takes longer to start cancer treatment, it's harder to find a mental health bed, it takes ages when you're well again to find a doctor who can sign you off to be discharged. Oh, and our doctors are 13 times more likely to be sued for negligence that barely registers on the global scale of medical cock-ups.
There aren't enough nurses, midwives or GPs. We've made it harder and more expensive to be all three, asked pharmacists to pick up the slack and then axed their training bursaries so we can expect to have less of them, too. We listen to the talk of fewer appointments, fewer A&Es, misdiagnoses and paying through the nose for cheap medicines we could all buy down the supermarket, like today's story in The Times that the NHS paid £1,500 for a £2 bottle of skin cream.
Even though that transaction can't be fully confirmed, even though it was described as "moisturiser" when it seems to be a bespoke concoction for a rare skin complaint, and even though it's linked to private corporate suppliers who've replaced pharmacists who used to mix such things cheaply and now don't because they're busy seeing patients who the GP can't, it's just another scandal to add to the others. Somehow we slowly absorb the lie that the NHS itself is to blame, that the ideal is at fault because after all we pay so MUCH.
And who promotes that lie? Who implies, infers and insinuates on the airwaves and in the newspapers that the NHS is dead, dying, futile, spendthrift, profligate, or likely to kill you?
It's not the poor, who rely upon it. It's not those with long-term problems, or anyone who's recently had a baby. It's not the disabled, the elderly, the terminally-ill, or someone who's just had their pipes checked in a routine screen that found something wrong.
It's the people who think they will never be anyone in the previous paragraph. The wealthy, the healthy, the thick.
It's those who campaigned hard for Brexit for the same reason they think the Tories are wet and the NHS is a socialist experiment - the ones whose actions and public utterances never once reference what may be best for others, who resent their higher taxes because they have to share the NHS with plebs. Those who foghorn their way through life "telling it like it is" without at any point wondering what "it" is like for everyone else.
(Image: Science Photo Library RM)
The glory of the NHS is that even when such poor examples of humanity are in need they still get help. When Nigel Farage's plane fell out of the sky, when Paul Nuttall finally seeks help for that mythomania, when Jeremy Hunt took his children to A&E because he didn't want to wait for a GP appointment he has personally ensured they'd have to wait longer for.
Of course the NHS spends too much on cheap medicines - that's what happens when you cut the managers out of a bureaucracy that needs checks on the paperwork as much as doctors on the front line. Of course there are mistakes - that's what happens when you make staff do 12-hour shifts with no breaks day after day after day.
And of course there are always idiots who forget they were vaccinated against a dozen diseases, that their mother could have died in childbirth, that their father should have had a heart attack a decade ago, that their siblings wouldn't have made it or that childhood broken leg, without the NHS, would have crippled them for life and condemned them to penury.
Speaking for myself, the NHS has saved me a thousand times over. My birth, my childhood, head injuries, stitches, brain scans, epilepsy, my daughter's birth, my parents' statins and screenings. I paid £8 for a prescription yesterday, and did so gladly because I got it for free while I was pregnant, and because I'm alive and so are all my loved ones.
The winter crisis doesn't have to happen every year. The lies and slurs and belittling of the greatest thing this country ever did for itself, and showed the rest of the world, do not have to stick. They're marching on Downing Street tomorrow but wherever you are, stop what you're doing, look around you, and count the ways the NHS has helped you.
And realise that £1 a week is the very least you could do, and only those sickened by selfishness would refuse.