Nigel Farage deserves to become Prime Minister in 2029, and the British people deserve him in return. But before he reaches the door of 10 Downing Street, he’ll have to make some headway in public perception on Britain’s National Health Service (NHS).
Right now, polling shows that while Britons back Farage and his Reform party on immigration, law and order, and Brexit, they have some way to go on healthcare, education, and the economy in general.
But instead of the usual political tributes to what has long been a national religion in the United Kingdom, the NHS, Farage and his team should start talking about what’s killing Britons: a government that refuses to spend responsibly on life-saving drugs.
The public already knows the NHS is broken. Still, the mindrotting propaganda regarding workable solutions has progressed so much that even four in 10 Reform Party voters recently said they would be “less likely to support Nigel Farage’s party if it proposed to change the NHS to an insurance-based model.”
That indicates a remarkably intransigent voting public, attached more to the founding concept of the 77-year-old institution than its outcomes or current state. In many cases, people don’t know much better. They hear tell of skyrocketing American healthcare costs and are told, usually by those with a vested interest in the socialized system, that this is their only other choice. That is nonsense, of course. But the specter of privatization looms too perilous to conceive of alternatives. Better to grin and bear it. Stiff upper lip. The old blitz spirit.
But Britain isn’t being bombarded by the Luftwaffe. And yet, there’s rationing, eight million people on waiting lists, 14,000 deaths in Accident and Emergency queues last year alone, drug shortages, and no accountability for decades.
Reform for Britain’s health system is still the third rail for many politicians. But if the Reform Party is going to be true to its purpose, it must seek to reform all of broken Britain, not just what is politically easy.
NOT SO NICE.
For decades, NHS drug policy has been governed by the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE), which uses a crude cost-effectiveness formula to decide whether a medicine is “worth” funding. If a new treatment doesn’t deliver one year of “perfect health” for less than £30,000 ($40,000), it is rejected.
That threshold was set in 1999 and hasn’t been adjusted for inflation in 25 years. Today, it would be over £53,000 — a change that could’ve saved countless lives.
Instead, NICE blocked an Alzheimer’s drug that slows progression. It denied a breast cancer drug that doubled survival rates. It stood between British patients and the treatments transforming outcomes in the United States and beyond.
People are forced to ration cystic fibrosis pills because they’re afraid of running out. ADHD patients are self-medicating. Pancreatic cancer survivors trade black-market Creon on Instagram because NHS supply chains are so brittle that they collapse at the first strain.
TRUMP’S TRADE DEAL.
Earlier this year, President Donald J. Trump penned a trade deal with Prime Minister Keir Starmer, including a bold provision: the NHS would review its drug procurement rules to allow greater access for American-made, cutting-edge drugs.
Derided by the usual suspects — Guardian columnists, bureaucrats, even some Tories — as a backdoor for “American pharma greed,” the deal simply removes artificial barriers that prevent Brits from accessing treatments already available to Americans, Israelis, and Australians, to name a few.
Starmer agreed to “endeavour to improve the overall environment, ” which, for him, is actually a pretty good start. But it will take real political courage to go further — to reform NICE, diversify procurement, raise the cost thresholds, let pharmacists prescribe alternatives during shortages, and stop pretending you can run a modern healthcare system like it’s the early 1950s.
MAHA INTERNATIONAL.
Of course, it’s not just about drugs. But an overall healthier Britain should be high up the Reform Party’s agenda. A ‘Make America Healthy Again’ movement for the UK. Ditch the seed oils. Ban harmful chemicals. Encourage exercise. Let Britons be masters of their own bodies again.
Healthcare reform — genuine, honest, radical reform — is the last great unclaimed battlefield in British politics. Labour won’t touch it. The Tories did little in 14 years of government besides raising general budgets and hoping the bureaucrats would solve the problems.
This allows Nigel Farage to walk right through the gap and speak to a national truth no one else will: “I’m not here to privatize the NHS. I’m here to make sure it can save your life.”
That’s how you win the “bills and blue lights” voters, who are currently telling pollsters they are most concerned about two major policy areas: the economy and emergency services.
That’s how you fix a country on the brink. And that’s how Farage can take his already successful movement into government.
Picture credit: @IncMonocle, Stuart Mitchell, used with permission.
