NHS Data Sale: Ramifications?

All members of the broadly defined ‘left’ occasionally fall into the trap Yeats left us when he said ‘the best lack all conviction whilst the worst are filled with passionate intensity’. Thankfully, my spell amongst the ‘best’, demonstrated in the sickening sentimentality of last week’s piece, has been rudely cut short by the Tories frankly mind-boggling new ‘bright idea’ – selling NHS data to insurance companies! The experts are full of their usual panglossian justifications, that this ‘new’ idea will bring about the best of all possible worlds and lead to new scientific advances. Certainly, it may well lead to insurance companies ‘re-identifying’ certain patients, but this is a ‘small, theoretical risk’; says Mark Davies the new Health and Social Care Information Centre’s ‘public assurance director’. The title isn’t even Orwellian: the Tories know that the public is going to have to be ‘assured’, because they sure as hell aren’t going to be ‘insured’ any longer. Forgive me, I move too fast; some of the public isn’t going to be insured any longer. The economic ‘liabilities’ who are at risk of ‘illness’ and ‘disease’ and ‘death’ and other such ‘theoretical risks’. And insurance companies have an exemplary ethical record: take Friends Life’ who are refusing to pay Nic Hughes’ family the expected 100 thousand pounds life insurance. Nic Hughes died of cancer at the age of 44 leaving behind wife Susannah and their twin 8 year-olds behind. But there is good reason for Friend’s Life’s decision: Nic Hughes lied on his application. He failed to disclose ‘pins and needles’. For those of you who don’t know, this devastating disease is responsible for the deaths of zero people worldwide in a given year. Symptoms are a brief, slightly annoying itch. Causes are not well known but often linked with sitting down for extended periods of time. So, who can fail to understand when this company which manages 111 billion pounds ‘on behalf of its customers’ makes the tough decision to punish Nic Hughes for his sin by not granting his remaining family the support they had expected and relied on. What fine and unmoving moral fibre in the face of such a pathological case. Pathological meant, of course, in a strictly Kantian sense. If you are not already persuaded, then rest assured (though for certain technical reasons not insured…) there is sound precedent. Private practices like Bupa already have access to sensitive patient data, and the comparison is relevant because Bupa, being a private practice, is clearly keen to take money away from patients’ families. And anyway, Mike Davies is unsure how ‘helpful’ the distinction between ‘private’ and ‘public’ is ‘these days’. Try asking at your local NHS and then some ‘helpful’ people might enlighten you. To the order of several thousand pounds. This will improve scientific medical research and that is no bad thing. Forget, that the health industry now has multiple times the funding from the American government as the famous ‘military-industrial complex’. Forget that this same medical industry managed to get naturally occurring chemical synthesis routes patented. This has had two effects, strangling the pharmaceutical industry in the ‘developing world’ and effectively preventing scientists from releasing cures to diseases unpatented even if they would like. It would seem that to Jonas Salk’s question ‘Can you patent the sun?’ the law has answered yes. So, as you can see, the pharmaceutical industry will benefit, the insurance companies will benefit, and other people will automatically benefit as a result. Who exactly these other people are, I do not know. There is a curious practice often noticed whereby policy makers often become consultants for companies which have benefited from their policies, but this being a purely contingent event does not amount to corruption. This would be the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy, as the logicians like to say. We should perhaps thank the Tories for understanding a basic inconsistency that has long gone without resolution but first articulated in Samuel Butler’s Erewhon. It is of course as ridiculous to punish criminals for their crimes if these crimes are as a result of social conditions as it is to punish the diseased. And since, of course, criminals must be punished, and since, of course, criminals are almost wholly the working and lower-middle classes, and thus criminals are criminals as a result of their social conditions, it follows that any reasonable government must punish the sick and unhealthy. If these sick and unhealthy should be so indecent as to die, then this fleeing from just punishment must of course lead to the transference of said punishment to those that were the lately deceased’s nearest and dearest. It is this that the Tory government has proposed and for this David Cameron, I solute ye.