I recently had blood tests for four issues that I thought it worth checking – blood sugar levels, liver function, kidney function and PSA.
After about a month I had heard nothing so I contacted the GP surgery asking about the results. Rather than offering an appointment for me to discuss the results with my GP, the surgery sent me a (completely incomprehensible to me) three-page print-out full of medical terms and measurements I had never heard of giving the results of 28 analyses the blood-testing lab had done.
As I have no medical training, this was worse than useless to me. So I started to wonder why my GP had no desire to discuss the results with me either in person or in an on-line consultation. Yet, while my GP seemingly doesn’t want to engage with me about the results of my blood tests, I am constantly getting emails, SMS messages and even phone calls from the surgery encouraging me to have all sorts of wonderful vaccinations – Covid booster, meningitis, shingles, pneumonia, flu and probably a couple of others I’ve forgotten about. In fact, the day after the surgery emailed me the blood-test results without offering me a GP appointment to discuss them, the surgery phoned me to encourage me to come in for a flu vaccine and a Covid booster.
So, aware of Cicero’s famous quote ‘cui bono’, I had a brief look at how GPs are paid.
The average GP (not the surgery) had 2,294 patients as of April 2024. This is an increase of 7.2 per cent since 2019. I imagine this must be mainly due to our rulers’ (Tory, Labour and LibDem) admirable open-borders, bring-in-the-Third-World, give-them-all-free-healthcare immigration policies. After all, the UK fertility rate is around 1.56 children per woman – well below the replacement rate of about 2.1. So the increase in GP patient numbers can’t be ‘home-grown’.
A Department of Health website suggests that GPs get on average £164.64 per patient per year. So that’s an average annual earnings of £377,684 per GP. Of course GPs have all sorts of expenses to pay with this money – premises, staff, IT systems and suchlike. So their take-home income will be considerably less. From the little I understand, this payment method means that GPs’ earnings won’t vary much whether they see ten or 100 patients a week. All that is important is how many patients are registered with that GP. So, there’s not much incentive for our GPs to work too much.
However, as you probably know or have guessed, GPs can increase their earnings by, for example, administering all sorts of wonderful but questionably safe-and-effective vaccinations. I think GPs get £10.06 per dose administered for both shingles and flu. I haven’t been able to find the amounts for meningitis and pneumonia vaccinations, but suspect it is probably similar. I have the impression they get quite a bit more for Covid vaccinations. And the excellent thing is that the vaccinations can be done by the probably modestly paid practice nurse or some individual with just two years’ training pretending to be a medic but who probably wouldn’t recognise a broken leg even if it kicked them in the arse. So to do the vaccinations, the real doctor doesn’t have to waste valuable time on unpleasant, possibly unhealthy patients.
I haven’t done any further research. But I got the impression that there are all sorts of other ‘services’ GPs can offer to boost their bank accounts. I found one website which claimed GPs also get paid extra based on the number of prescriptions issued, and another which stated that GPs could increase their income by prescribing statins as part of a government incentive scheme to improve the nation’s health – or at least improve the financial health of the Big Pharma companies. But, as far as I can see, the number of consultations GPs have with patients doesn’t seem to make much difference to their wealth.
Perhaps that’s why our GPs would rather offer you all the other stuff they are paid extra for rather than stooping so low as to squander their well-rewarded time on face-to-face appointments with us suckers whose taxes fund our (often part-time) GPs’ comfortable lifestyles.
As for my blood-test results, I made an appointment costing £90 to see a private-sector GP to have the results explained to me. It turned out that one of the tests produced a slightly worrying result which has caused me to make some significant changes in my lifestyle. It’s a pity my GP didn’t have the time or inclination to inform me about this. I wonder what happened to all the taxes I’ve paid over many years to have our ‘free-at-the-point of-delivery’ NHS provide medical care should I need it? Oh yes, I remember now, they’ve been used to pay for generous pay rises for our health workers and for providing the millions of wonderful people, who enter the UK legally and illegally each year, with the healthcare they expect as their human right without ever having paid anything into the system.
David Craig’s latest book THERE IS NO CLIMATE CRISIS is available as a paperback or ebook from Amazon
This piece was first published in TCW Defending Freedom, and is reproduced by kind permission.
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GPs
NHS GPs will go the way of NHS Dentists – for all practical purposes, they won’t exist. Having been forced to seek out the help of private GPs myself, I can say that they are often low calibre prescription pushers like their NHS counterparts. A clinic that doesn’t do vaccinations is something of an indicator that they might do more than be pimps for Big Pharma.
I joined the PPG (Patient participation group ) at my local surgery last year, if you are interested in gaining an insight as to how your local surgery works then I urge you to join.
GPs are paid for dispensing prescriptions not for prescribing them. I was constantly urged to start taking statins last year as my cholesterol level was high, but I chose to make a few changes to my diet instead and my cholesterol is now “normal “ .
I was going to tell my story – then thought, you know what, I can’t be bothered. It would only be the same as everybody else’s. That in itself is so depressing. I live in fear of getting ill when there just isn’t anybody there to care.