Here we have an individual who has been elected as an MP, on a generous salary (currently >£86k pa). At the same time, he is moonlighting as a part time doctor for the NHS - an organisation which could probably do with his attention - as a trained doctor - for perhaps a little more than that. This same individual then has the temerity to suggest that the government is not focussed on public services. This critic has two public service posts: one of which it can be reasonably expected of him to devote all his energies (for £86k pa); the other, under who auspices he probably was trained, on which he suggests the government is not focused. If he focused on one or the other, he may have a point. Meanwhile, pots and kettles spring to mind.
Of course you jest. The NHS is awash with money. It consumes half a billion pounds a day. It spends getting on for £3,000 a year for every man, woman and child in the country (the majority of whom make no calls on its services). What it is short of is the organisational ability to spend those sums wisely and efficiently - which is very surprising because it is also awash with administrators (of whom it has almost as many as it has medics).
Doctors have to do a certain number of shifts a year in order to stay qualified. Somebody who takes a 5-10 year break to do politics would be fool not to meet their medical requirements. Liam Fox also continued doing work as a doctor for years in order to stay qualified, although I'm not sure he's still doing it now. While I'm not a huge fan of having a second job I think spending 20-30 days a year experiencing a normal job in the world outside of politics is probably time well-spent for MPs.
As to the amount spent on the NHS, it's difficult to really understand where you're coming from. We spend less on health that virtually every other comparable country. My healthcare needs as a healthy middle-aged man don't come to anything like £3000, but I'm not paying just for me, and just for now. I suspect I ran up quite a bill by being born in a hospital. If I ever get cancer, like 50% of people do, then the costs of my care in the multiple years it will take to cure me or help me die comfortably are likely to be multiple of £3000. Once I get older like my parents, then I think it's quite likely that my ongoing drugs bill will be excess of £3k a year, and the hospital stays both had last year will have cost north of £10k each.
The administrators thing is really a red-herring, partly because most of the excessive bureaucracy in the NHS was introduced by the idiot Cameron government in the name of efficiency - adding market layers and provider choice is wildly expensive in terms of administration. Moreover it's pretty wild to complain that the NHS employs more non-medics than medics. There are huge numbers of things that need to happen to make organisations happen - people have to cover payroll, plan, build and maintain hospitals, buy supplies, hire people, fire people, cook, clean, and if we don't want to live in a hellish dystopia we probably even need gardeners. It's completely normal for any organisation to have more non-specialist staff than they have staff performing the core function.
Generally speaking the non-medics earn less than the medics, and do their own particular jobs more effectively than the medics and on a fraction of the training. You
could employ doctors and nurses to plan the hospitals, work out what health needs a local population will have in 5 years and run the payroll, and then you'd be able to proudly declare that you'd tamed the administration budget. All you would actually have achieved though is a massive increase in the wage bill and longer term a massive additional training budget for the country.
