I hope you are not my friend. I hope you are not even a friend of a friend of a friend. I hope I don’t know you in the slightest and that way you are not in my comfortable echo chamber, the one that replies with aligned responses when I shout on social media. Hopefully this means that you are not planning to vote Labour this Thursday.

I don’t watch the news or read current affairs online, I have a very basic knowledge of how politics works here or accross the world, I struggle to keep dates and names in my head and I wouldn’t feel confident to speak about the intricacies of Brexit (no matter how much I read up on it) or on behalf of a political party or agenda. What I can speak on is far greater than any affiliation to a political party leader, whether they are a characature of an elitist bumbling fool or a working class hero who still takes the bus, what I can speak on is the NHS and the reality of its privatisation.

I’m going to keep this short because we really don’t have time.

Below is a list of the approx converted costs for my dad’s cancer treatments if we’d had a privatised health care system in the UK based on the figures from the health care system in the USA.

£193 – Ambulance rides not involving medical intervention

£3,006 – Hospital stays per day

£8,375 – Chemotherapy per month

£2,606 – Vertebioplastry

£1,979 – MRI scan

£198 – X-ray

£400 – Hospice stay per day

£400 – £1500 – Perscription medication per month

My dad had:

2 ambulance journeys per year on average

1 hospital stay per year on average, shortest 2 days, longest 2 weeks

4 rounds of Chemotherapy

8 clinical drug trials

1 Vertebioplastry

Multiple MRI scans & X-rays

Pain medication and prescriptions

All this over 11 years.

Arriving at the rough estimate of:

TOTAL: £250,063

Oh, and not to mention mum had two knee replacements and a hip replacement during this time.

At this point why bother doing the extra math.

Now, I consider myself lucky, both my parents had good jobs and teachers pensions so as a family I imagine under a privatised healthcare system we would of had health insurance, at the cost of approx £889 a month which depending on our plan would of brought our medical bills down considerably, but still with a massive financial impact and probably a sizable amount of debt.

Imagine if, like so many of the families I have worked with in my profession, we couldn’t have afforded health insurance?

He would of been dead within 6 months.

Do not vote Conservative. Do not waste your vote on Lib Dem, do not waste your vote on Green. Do not vote for death. Vote for the NHS. And the only way to do this is to use your vote to secure the majority for Labour.