What Remains
“I can’t hate you, no matter how much people tell me that I should.
I miss you more than I thought I could,
I still love you in some way.
I might be able to forgive you one day,
But until then I will cling to your memory.
I’m trying to forgive your treachery,
Our friendship will haunt me forever
For trying to hate you is a fruitless endeavour.”
For those who are abandoned in love, feelings are likely to be a cocktail of grief, anger, despair and wounded self-esteem.
First reactions to the news that you’ve been dumped can be disastrous. Some launch an immediate barrage of hatred and blame, effectively killing off any hope of reconciliation. Others grovel in the hope of winning back their lost love – and in so doing, compromise an important part of their personality and self-esteem. Some remain diminished and steeped in bitterness, while others accept their loss and, like the poet above, try to find ways of coping that enable them to move on with their lives.
It’s a sad reality that when relationships are sundered, the good times are often forgotten, what the couple once valued in each other is rubbished, and the time they spent together is regarded as wasted.
If only the psychological contract that underpins every close relationship included the following words:
“If you should go one day where I cannot be,
I’ll cherish that of you that you leave in me.
And I hope you will be forever true
to that of me that I have left in you.”
Like a Drunken Sailor
When I was Chairman of the Milton Keynes and Buckingham Health Authorities, I was astounded by the waste. Staff had absolutely no idea how to make savings – it simply wasn’t part of the culture.
The NHS is an incredibly generous system that the public takes for granted. It oozes waste, and no politician wants to take on the career-shattering responsibility of trying to reform it. Why? Former chancellor Nigel Lawson once claimed that the NHS was the nearest thing the English have to a god and so anyone seeking to make changes was immediately accused of blasphemy.
Of course, opportunities to make savings abound. Take the 148 million hospital outpatient appointments made across the NHS last year. Each one costs between £120 and £165 on average.
Guess what? More than five per cent of patients don’t show. So, as the Americans say, do the math. That equates to around £1.2 billion of your money wasted each year.
Next, around a million doctor appointments are made every day, but thousands simply don’t show – marked as “DNA” (did not attend). There’s no penalty, so why should non-attendees bother? Common courtesy is no more than a dream. I’m told that trying to impose a penalty – say a tenner – is too complex. How daft is that? We’re issued with an NHS number. A simple adjunct to the NHS app to take a refundable deposit could easily be administered by the software. New Zealand operates such a system, so why not here?
Free at the point of use also means free to abuse, so why was it set up in this cavalier way? That’s easy. The NHS was established at a time when the public had a far lower sense of entitlement, and we were more thoughtful in those faraway days. Few care today.
Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman wrote that there are four ways in which you can spend money. First, on yourself. When you do that, you really watch what you’re spending, and you really try to grind out the greatest value from your hard-earned cash. Then you can spend it on someone else, for example by buying a birthday present for a friend. Well, then you’re not so careful about the content of the present, but you’re very careful about the cost.
Then, you can spend someone else’s money on yourself. And if that’s the case, why not treat yourself to a jolly good lunch with oysters, fillet steak and a bottle of Chablis? Finally, you can spend somebody else’s money on somebody else. Then you’re not too concerned how much it is, or about the value you get for the money.
Welcome to the NHS. The public has little sense of the vast scale of the money poured into the system or how it’s spent. This disconnect is one of its fundamental problems – and it will end up bankrupting us all.