Opinion
cometh the famine After the feast
NHS dentistry has for too long been a burden on taxpayers, argues Dr Eilert Eilertson. Now is the time to shake up the system
B
ritain, for the first time ever, is now over £1 trillion in debt – a stagger- ingly enormous
figure. If you counted one pound every second, it would take about 35,000 years to add it all up. The highly wasteful interest
on this tidy pile amounts to just short of £45 billion every year, or more than Great Brit- ain’s annual defence budget. This money has to come from taxation and is topped up by yet more borrowing. The not- so-big secret is that nobody knows how to pay it off and if nothing is done, it is going to eat your lunch or, more likely, your pension! How on earth does Govern-
ment manage to get through such colossal amounts of money? Currently, Govern- ment spending is dominated by welfare and healthcare, amounting to some £310bn in 2010/11 out of a total of £700bn, including the interest. Taxes raised were short of £500bn, so we are failing to balance the books or even begin to pay our way. Clearly, we are broke. The
national overdraft is as high as it has ever been and it is getting worse, not better. It is estimated that the debt will rocket to £1.6 trillion by 2015! The pips squeaketh; we are
28 Scottish Dental magazine
in an unsustainable, taxed-to- the-max, spend-to-the-end, vicious circle. What is going to happen?
Firstly, the only way out of this mess is for politicians to stop spending and to balance the books by being honest about what services we can actually afford. The spending binge of the
last decade when prudence let rip with the country’s credit card is rapidly coming to an end and politicians who have bribed the electorate with ever-more freebies are going to have to come to terms with the dishonesty of their policies and the hangover of their lack of sustainability. Needless to say, anyone who speaks out
against politicians’ profligacy and public waste is pilloried, but that will change as the debt accumulates and the cash runs out. I believe that before the end
GOVERNMENT RESPONSE
Margie Taylor, Chief Dental Officer for the Scottish Government, said: “As a direct result of our preventive approach to dental health, this Government is already seeing improvements in the nation’s oral health. “We believe that capital developments, such as extensions of outreach centres, have improved access to NHS dentistry and the expansion of training
facilities for dental gradu- ates and therapists lays the foundations for continuing to improve access in the future. “Such Government grants recognise the pressures on dentists to meet the range of requirements placed upon them, such as funding purpose-built decontamination units to ensure the highest standards of hygiene and infection control for patients.”
of this decade, we will see our economy rebalance to a low tax economy that allows enterprise to flourish as it does in the Far East. I think we will see an end to welfarism, with people having to relearn the joy of standing on their own two feet and looking after themselves. In the long term, this works, whereas our 50-year experi- ment in socialism has been an abject failure that has bank- rupted the country. So, how will this affect the
tiny world of dentistry in Britain? Looking back, I think taxpayers’ cash has been waste- fully sprayed at NHS dentistry. Instead of wise public health, preventively orientated, and policies that are highly cost effective, our professional leaders and their political masters have gone off in the old drill-and-fill (badly) direction.
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