Privatising the NHS

My sweetie looks worried.

There’s blood in my pee.

Oh. And what did we eat yesterday?

Er, beetroot.

Right, and plenty of it. That’ll be forty-three pounds-ninety please. Plus VAT.

Actually and seriously, these days we have to go to comedians for the most penetrative analyses of what’s going down. Like these gems from Frankie Boyle in today’s Graun:

I sympathise a little with Hunt – born into military aristocracy, a cousin of the Queen, Charterhouse then Oxford then into PR. Trying to get him to understand the life of an overworked nurse is like trying to get an Amazonian tree frog to understand the plot of Blade Runner.

The government believes that death rates are going up because doctors are lazy, rather than because we’ve started making disabled people work on building sites.

Then Frankie gets to the point:

This is part of a conscious strategy to run the service down to a point where privatisation can be sold to the public as a way of improving things.

Naturally, things won’t actually be improved; they’ll be sold to Virgin. Virgin can’t get the toilets to work on a train from Glasgow to London, so it’s time we encouraged it to branch out into transplant surgery. With the rate the NHS is being privatised, it won’t be long before consultations are done via Skype with a doctor in Bangalore. Thank God we’re raising a generation who are so comfortable getting naked online. “I’m afraid it looks like you’ve had a stroke. No, my mistake – you’re just buffering.”