The Last Ditch by Tom Paine

Link: NHS Blog Doctor: Leaving medicine.

Socialists will tell you that "boom and bust" is a capitalist phenomenon, but if you want real "feast or famine" try central planning. After sucking in foreign doctors for years, the UK’s central planners girded up their loins and achieved a surplus of trained doctors. Over at NHS Blog Doctor (compulsory reading for anyone with the slightest interest in health care) newly-qualified doctors are complaining about having to leave their profession. Why? Because they cannot get jobs in Britain’s system of socialised medicine. They have a qualification that families in other countries would spend many tens of thousands to acquire for their offspring and they are throwing it away.

On the other hand, whether or not you or your health insurer can afford to pay for private treatment, you almost certainly can’t find a private General Practitioner (GP) in the UK outside London. Your health insurance (or wealth) can buy you private hospital treatment, but – as consultants insist on a referral – you must first go to your local Soviet Polyclinic health centre and see a State-funded GP.

These unemployed new doctors blistered their brains studying to qualify in a demanding profession. Outside Soviet Britain, it is perhaps the most respected and valued profession of all. If they don’t want to cash in on their investment by emigrating, why don’t they just "hang a shingle" and offer private services? It can be done.  Here’s an example turned up by thirty seconds of googling.

One of many reasons I never expect to return to the UK is that – after experiencing excellent care from polite and courteous private doctors abroad – I could not face standing in line with bored pensioners filling their days, malingerers looking to be signed off work and others that I would cheerfully pay good money to avoid. All this, just to get five minutes with a GP who would probably not look up from his desk. Yet starting a private service to sell their hard-earned skills for profit simply does not occur to these bright young people.

They are gifted, intelligent and well-placed to serve their fellow man. Their potential for a satisfying, rewarding career is enormous. Yet they feel impotent in the face of state incompetence and bleat like unemployed dockers. Yes it’s difficult to compete with "free" services. Yes most people will stand in line rather than pay. But in business you don’t need everyone to be your customer; just enough people. A substantial minority would pay a premium for time, attention and courtesy. Why does that not occur to these talented, presumably highly-intelligent individuals?

The problem may be that in choosing medicine in the first place, they had already ruled out a life in business. Their most likely career path was into the socialised health service, so presumably that (to me) grim prospect was appealing? Perhaps they see themselves  as "caring" types and are snooty about "money-grubbing." Perhaps, in short, like so many in Britain, their spirits have been neutered by Socialist indoctrination.

It’s such little things that tell you our civilisation is close to its end.