That's not what the NHS is for!

You see quite a lot of these stories in the news, especially on slow news days. They are invariably of the sort:

"Little Jack needs 3 million dollars for high-tech brain surgery that will give him four extra years of life. Oh, why won't the NHS fund this? Jimmy is a human being, and therefore deserves all the life that we can give him."

The NHS works like this, as far as I can tell:

Once upon a time, things were a lot like the US, in terms of health care. If you were reasonably okay for money and you got sick, you could easily be bankrupted. If you were poor, you couldn't afford treatment, unless you were very lucky, and able to find treatment in one of the few establishments helping people with no money. If you were rich, life was as good as can be. At some point, the UK thought, "This isn't really quite right," and decided that everyone deserves a free minimum standard of health care for two reasons - one, because it makes us productive and generates wealth, creates equality of value of life, rich or poor, etc, and two, because it's a Nice Thing to do.

The key word here is "minimum standard". The reason for this is that the NHS has finite resources and oh-so-finite money supplies. If they could give absolutely everyone who needed it a liver and a bed, they would. But they can't.

A key example of people forgetting the NHS's purpose is that liver drug. You know, the one that gives advanced liver cancer patients an extra 12 months or so.

First of all, how much good is this to the patient? 12 months of lying in bed, too weak to do much more than that. I may be exaggerating, I may not be, but quality of life is an important factor in these sorts of life-prolonging-not-actually-curing sorts of drugs.

To be heartless for a second, if their quality of life is poor, then they can't exactly come back to join society, work, pay taxes and contribute back to the State that has given them the money to get better. However, the State isn't always heartless. It recognises that it's okay to let people not of immediate utility to use resources. Still, it's something to think of.

More pressing is the amount of money this treatment costs. How many organ transplants, hip replacements, open heart surgeries, stitches and eye drops can we fund with the amount we'd spend on one person having an extra 12 months of (not necessarily quality) life? I don't know the answer to this question. The question is merely here to highlight that there is SO MUCH that the NHS has decided is part of a minimum standard of care. With all these things that are deemed to be essential, we don't have a great deal of money left over for things which are borderline.

By having a "minimum standard" existing, it means that certain treatments are not considered essential enough for the State to fund. That's why you can't get your boobs Jordanized for free. However, life is pretty precious. It's so precious that something about "right to life" is one of those human rights thingies. That's what makes this so hard to judge. Is prolonging life worth any cost? Some may say yes. (These people clearly have never been Chancellor of the Exchequer, balancing the books of the whole nation, not just the ill bit.)

I've not ever had a relative denied treatment on the NHS because they deemed it to be too dear, or too risky, or too *something*, so, I guess I'd be far more emotional and irrational talking about this if I was invested.

Still, I feel that no matter where you draw the line with free healthcare, someone will always be on the wrong side of that line, and they will always be upset. And that is how the world works, kids.

So, when you are on the wrong side of the line, go ahead and raise money, ask politicians nicely, get funding from some creepy rich business tycoon, but don't go to the Daily Mail and say "The NHS should fund this all for me because, because, because!" That's not what's it's there for. Sorry.