Yesterday at the Health and Well-Being Board, we discussed a document called the “NHS long term plan”. It kept referring to “taxpayers’ investment” in the NHS. This is quite a worrying phrase. The word investment means money put in to get a profit. So this raises the question of who is going to get a profit from the NHS. We taxpayers pay into it, not for profit, but on the understanding it will be there when we need it. So spending on the NHS is exactly that, spending, on treatment, surgery and medicines, not “investment”. It looks like a political phrase to me, a crafty use of words by those who want to privatise the NHS. In other words, this Tory government and their rich friends.
