Break out more party poppers for the Wonder of the WorldTM

Your humble Devil has expressed outrage and disgust at the NHS co-payments policy before, when examining the case of Colette Mills.

Now we can chalk up another victory for the bureaucrats of NHS, as they help to make another dying woman's last months as painful and distressing as possible.

A woman dying of cancer was denied free National Health Service treatment in her final months because she had paid privately for a drug to try to prolong her life.

Linda O’Boyle was told that as she had paid for private treatment she was banned from free NHS care.

She is believed to have been the first patient to die after fighting for the right to top up NHS treatment with a privately purchased cancer medicine that the health service refused to provide.

Oh, very well done, you bunch of fucking shits.

This weekend Brian, O’Boyle’s husband, said he was appalled by the way she was treated. He recalled his wife as a woman with an infectious laugh who had given a lifetime of service to the NHS as an assistant occupational therapist. The couple, who had three sons and four grandchildren, lived in Billericay, Essex.

After she developed bowel cancer and began having chemotherapy, doctors told her she should boost her chances of fighting the disease by adding another drug, cetuximab. It is not routinely funded by the NHS.

When she decided to use her savings to pay for it, Southend University Hospital NHS Foundation Trust withdrew her free treatment, including the chemotherapy drug she was receiving.

The trust said yesterday: “A patient can choose whether to continue with the treatment available under the NHS or opt to go privately for a different treatment regime. It is explained to the patient that they can either have their treatment under the NHS or privately, but not both in parallel.”

Why the fuck not? This woman has spent her entire working life paying National Insurance which, I might remind you, is supposed to pay for medical treatment (amongst other things). It isn't your money to withhold, you cunts; it is her money that the government was supposed to invest in an insurance fund.

Of course, the government has never, ever done that: as I have pointed out before, National Insurance is a scam, it is a Ponzi scheme.

As for Employer's National Insurance... well... LPUK health policy is still under review, although you can find our outlined aims here, but I, personally, would favour the abolition of NICs anyway. Any health payments certainly wouldn't be going to the state in any case; NI is just a Ponzi scheme (as is the public sector pension arrangement). Does this sound at all familiar?

Ponzi was bringing in cash at a fantastic rate, but the simplest financial analysis would have shown that the operation was running at a large loss. As long as money kept flowing in, existing investors could be paid with the new money, but colossal liabilities were accumulating.

As with NI, the money was not actually invested: it was simply used as income and the liabilities were paid out of that income. The Ponzi scheme was a massive fraud, and so is NI. As with tax—or, as I prefer to call it, extortion with menaces—if it wasn't the state doing it, the whole scheme would be illegal.

It is time to do away with this centralised healthcare and it is time to do away with National Insurance Contributions. Let people make their contributions to private healthcare schemes (you can regulate them, as per Switzerland. Seriously, if one single commenter whinges about the evil American insurance, I'll go fucking apeshit), and private unemployment insurance and private pension schemes.

At least they know that their money will actually be invested and that they will be able to access their funds and pay for the treatment that they fucking want. Even if her insurance company would not fund the drug that Linda O'Boyle wanted, at least they wouldn't make her pay for all of her treatment.

Seriously, I hope that the fucks who continue to take these decisions get really depressed and then go home and hang themselves.

But never mind: Labour's on the way out, eh? Surely the Tories will right this wrong?

David Cameron, the Conservative leader, said in a statement that it was “tempting” to allow patients to pay for extra cancer treatments that were not funded by the NHS.

The party has been reluctant to express an opinion on the issue, fearing that it could be portrayed as favouring middle-class patients who can afford to buy themselves extra treatment.

Oh. That'll be a "no", then.

Look, you fucks; you aren't creating a two-tier NHS or favouring the middle classes: you are simply allowing those who decide that they would like to have a chance at a few more months of life to top up the NHS treatment that they have already paid for throughout their working lives.

It isn't your money, you bastards: it is our money.

And because the National Insurance scheme is so obviously a scam, you have to force us to hand it over to you using state-sanctioned violence. And then you don't even have the decency to invest it as was promised: in fact, no government has ever invested it, as was promised. The National Insurance fund is a lie: it never existed.

National Insurance: the greatest Ponzi scheme ever and quite probably the most prolific scam ever perpetrated.

The bureaucrats of the NHS: amongst the most evil people on earth. May their wombs rot and their balls moulder within their disintegrating, disease-riddled bodies, the foetid ichor of their rapidly liquidising organs causing them exquisite agonies whilst the stench of decay warns all around them of their depravity as the decay of their bodies mirrors the pus-soaked interstitices of their moral-free minds.

Fuck them all. With a rusty nail-encrusted stick.

UPDATE: you really should go and read this post by Prodicus. Here is the preamble...

The following letter was leaked to our Fuck Me You're Joking Oh My God You're Not Are You correspondent.

Dear Customer,

It has come to my attention that you have broken our rules by purchasing medicine from a supplier who is not me. Your treatment is therefore cancelled with immediate effect.

What you should do now.

You should fuck off and die.

Thank you for using the National Health Service, and may I take this opportunity to wish you the best of luck with the rest of your... oh.

Yours sincerely,

Her Majesty's Secretary of State for Health

It just gets better...

UPDATE 2: Unity looks into the whole thing a little more carefully and specifically the efficacy of the drugs involved. His take is definitely worth reading, although it doesn't really alter my opinion on co-payments. As John Redwood points out, we all use co-payment all the time.

The government’s visceral hatred of co-payment for health is as absurd as it is dangerous. Practically everyone who uses the NHS practises co-payment. The very system Labour set up more than half a century ago soon required co-payment in the form of prescription charges. It always allowed private sector pharmacies to offer over the counter drugs to people for self treatment, or for treatment under the advice of the pharmacist.