tweet by Dr Lauren Gavaghan #NHSL… @Dancing TheMind:
Reminder: the NHS crisis is not due to immigrants, or the elderly, or people who drink alcohol, or nurses, or doctors. The crisis has been manufactured by a govt ideologically opposed to the NHS, who have systematically underfunded it for years.
This sounds exactly like the “starve the beast” mentality pushed by conservatives in the US since Reagan.
In short, it is a mentality by Republicans to purposefully underfund programs they don’t like to the point where they can’t function properly. Any department or agency needs a minimum number of workers and money to do what they were set up to do. Running under those numbers means cutting services or letting things slip under the cracks. That’s done on purpose because when it gets so bad, even formerly very popular programs will eventually become hated or untrusted by the public. And that’s when these conservatives and step in and say “well _____ department hasn’t met its goals, so it’s time for us to kill funding for it altogether”.
I don’t know the first thing about the NHS but I’ve been seeing these “starve the beast” tactics used here in the US and how damaging they are to institutions, so you folks need to know what you’re up against and fight it.
Exactly this except they’re not just killing funding, but actively cannibalising the service for their own profit. They’ve done it with pretty much all other public services here with awful results (for the public, those in power made millions if not billions)
They won’t stop funding… YET.
And that’s the key word here because eventually they will.
While liberals seem to only think in weeks and months before they lose interest in a particular issue and move onto something next, these conservatives play the long game. Years and even decades of slowly chipping away at these government “beasts” till they eventually kill them off via starvation.
You guys really need to find a way to attack these conservatives before they go full-on Republican amd simply try to overthrow the government a la Jan 6th.
Oh, spot on.
And that last part? Honestly? I think that point has come and gone, we’re just less… Rowdy? About it. And the way our system works is a little different, but bottom line - the government is already a useless body to anyone but the super rich. There is no opposition and their power only keeps growing (the house of “lords” is a whole can of worms I won’t even start on here). We don’t need a silly pretend revolution (where the people revolting are literally working for those in charge), they’ve politely just been eating away at our rights and freedoms.
It’s so depressing.
This could literally be said about any social program in myriad different countries.
Indeed, the problem is global
And that is why universal health care will not work in America.
Nothing can be worse than a for profit health service (which is what the NHS is slowly being turned in to)
