I accept all the above but still maintain the NHS is having to care for a large proprtion of people who are not actually contributing in taxes, whether through being unemployed for what ever reason or the volumne of people coming into the Country and overwhelming the system.
so back in the 1950s just after the creation of the NHS the unemployment rate was really low something like 1-2% which is crazy when you consider the number of people coming back from the war with injuries and disabilities.
These days the number is more like 5% so more than double, despite no wars. you can look at benefit claiming numbers to get an idea of the number of people claiming but not paying into the system. There are something like 85% of people claiming sickness benefits are UK and Irish nationals so people who were born here. the rest are migrants however the vast majority of those are here legally people from France, Germany Spain etc who may have worked but become unwell while living here, but they have contributed.
What's kind of funny about this whole thing is that illegal immigrants can't claim these benefits, often they want to stay off the radar so historically they would disappear into the community and take up low paying manual jobs that no one else would do, they would work cash in hand and while they didn't pay taxes they would be contributing indirectly because they still created money for there employers who paid into the system. they would not go to the doctors either unless it was life or death.
Since the crack down on illegal immigrants and the publicity of the migrant situation the government has spent a fortune on capturing and identifying migrants who are here illegally, barring them from working and forcing them to wait for months or years in government paid for properties with basics such as food, health care etc provided while they wait for their claim to be processed. So now we have a reputation as a country that will provide you with everything you need, a house, clothes, food and health care, if only you're willing to find a way to get here. once over the boarder they now immediately make themselves known to the authorities so they can start collecting their bounty.
So you could argue the cheapest and most cost effective way to deal with illegal immigration is to stop looking for it.
No Migrants are really not the issue. when it comes to who has paid into the system but uses the system, illegal immigrants are only a tiny proportion. there are far bigger numbers of people who either have never worked and never contributed to the system but use a lot of the NHS resources who are not immigrants. The UK government spends hundreds of millions every year trying to vet the claims of people for sickness benefits when it would far far cheaper to just pay the claims.. it might not be right or fair but it is actually true. Contracts paid to private companies to assess people for things like ESA and PIP, cost the government far more than a few dodgy claims its very big business... now who do you think owns the companies who get awarded these massive government contracts.
Years ago we had the PFI system for building new hospitals. The hospital would be built by a private company and then rented back to the NHS. The cost of building the new hospital would then be spread over decades but really rather than paying say £200m for building a new state of the art hospital. The total cost would now be in the Billions as the rent over 20, 30, 40 years would rack up to stupid amounts, guess what companies got the contracts to build those hospitals..... Who do we think probably has shares in these massive companies and conversely how much do the executives of these companies
donate to the political campaigns of specific parties and politicians...
Projects like the HS2 railway (now this is just my opinion now) have cost the country billions with nothing to show for it. All of the work on that has been paid to private companies, those companies are owned and operated by some of the richest people in the country. Huge sums, Billions has been paid out for that work and gone somewhere? we should be looking at where that money has gone. Huge amounts of land was procured from people and then when it wasn't needed it was auctioned or sold off to companies very cheaply rather than giving it back to the people who owned it before. You don't have to look far to see stories of farmers who had land taken for HS2 and then when not needed it was sold to house builders.
The government does not want to tax the million and billionaires of this country at an appropriate rate because they have just spent a lot of time and effort getting that money out of the government coffers and into their pockets of these private firms. back 50 - 70 years ago, the tax rates on the rich were far far higher than they are now, and any sort of large scale project was managed and handled by the government who were accountable for every penny spent.
Privatizing the NHS means that any money spent on services faces far less scrutiny than it would if in the governments hands.
The other model to consider is that once you privatize something you can't easily take it back so while initially the contracts with private firms appear to save money compared to what it is costing the NHS, once the company takes over and the government buildings are all sold off, that private firm now holds the monopoly of that service, they can start to charge what they want, as it would always be far more costly to take that service back from the private company and start a new. 5 years later the service that used to cost the NHS £5M is now more like £8M because of inflation and other reasons, but you're stuck paying it, because it would cost you £20M to acquire property, equipment staff etc, for anyone else to set something up to take over.
So lets all complain about a few migrants and fill the headlines with that, because it distracts from what's really going on behind the scenes. Its not "corruption" because its all perfectly legal an above board, but at the same time its dodgy as hell.
