Welcome to the stage of capitalism where we charge sick people to rent wheelchairs

Just wait until you hear which company is behind this

Now my American friends are probably wondering what the big deal is here. Most of them don’t even have healthcare. If they get sick, they’re supposed to die quietly at the side of the road, but we in the UK are not quite so far gone. We are rapidly heading in that direction though. The NHS is about as safe in the hands of Wes Streeting as a hamster is in the coils of a hungry python.

The fundamental idea of the NHS is that it’s free at the point of use, that you’re not denied healthcare because you can’t afford to pay. Well, it seems inability to walk no longer counts as “health” and helping people walk no longer counts as “healthcare”. Your legs are considered luxury items, just like your teeth. If you don’t want to be an immobile toothless loser, pull yourself up by your bootstraps or something.

The latest horror story to emerge is that King’s College Hospital in London has decided it would be a brilliant idea to charge people for the use of wheelchairs. The story was originally broken by Jim Waterson’s new Substack called London Centric (if you’re confused by his headline, scroll halfway down the page!)

King’s College Hospital points out the wheelchairs are free to use for the first four hours, but if anything, this makes things worse. The hospital has among the longest waiting times in the country with patients regularly being left for more than 12 hours.

If a broke and vulnerable person needs a wheelchair, they are forced to provide their card details to a company called WheelShare. The patient might hope they’ll be in and out of hospital, but when their stay lasts much longer than four hours, they will have no choice but to pay. The charge is £2 an hour and while that might not seem like a lot to some, I’ve been one of the people for who £2 is the difference between eating and starving. The hospital could be forcing sick and injured people to go hungry while they’re recovering.

Patients are being hit with a double-whammy because they can’t call an ambulance because the waiting times are so long. The whole point of an ambulance service is it’s supposed to be an emergency service, but ours is unable to respond to actual emergencies in many parts of the country. That’s how bad things are.

If you have an emergency, you’d better hope you have a friend who can give you a lift, otherwise you will be paying for a taxi or lying in the street. If you can’t pay for a wheelchair when you get to hospital, you will have to crawl like Rambo, or hope a good Samaritan will give you a carry! If you smear blood on the floor, I guess you are expected to clean it up, or pay a cleaning bill! Isn’t our healthcare service brilliant?

King’s College Hospital claims it offers a refund on the wheelchair charge to patients who’ve had to wait a long time, but the patients are saying this is not true. Laughably, the hospital’s other defence is the charge stops people stealing wheelchairs. Are we expected to believe wheelchair theft is so serious a problem that jeopardising vulnerable people is a preferable alternative?

Anyway, you shouldn’t have to hand over your money to a private company and then ask for it back. That’s your money! The hospital could be forcing people into unauthorised overdraft, and when you’re poor, that’s a death spiral.

When you’re needlessly charging people to rent things that are essential, things that we used to own until capitalists took them away, it’s not even capitalism anymore. Forcing people to pay rents like this is feudalism. This company is not providing a service, it’s leaving wheelchairs sitting there until you give them money for doing nothing. This is another example of cost cutting measures costing us more and harming our wellbeing.

It somehow gets even worse: WheelShare, the company that rents out the wheelchairs is based in Israel, meaning you can’t do BDS without putting your health at risk. The NHS is subsiding the genocidal settler-colony and so are you, if you need a wheelchair.

Disgustingly, three Israeli directors are lining their pockets by exploiting our most sick and vulnerable citizens. Pay close attention to the address of their company. You will be thrilled to hear Rosh Haayin was built on the site of an Ottoman fort and a destroyed Palestinian village.

David Miller points out on Twitter:

Rosh Hayin is, of course, a settlement. Built on top of the historic 16th Century Ottoman Fort that used to exist there. The fort and the Palestinian village next to it, was called Ras Al-Ayn. It was all destroyed when the Palestinians were forcibly removed in the 1920s (yes, more than 20 years before the Nakba).

David Miller also points out our health secretary has extensive connections to Israel. Israeli fingerprints are all over NHS privatisation, with one company, Palantir, getting a £330 million NHS contract. Palantir is linked to the Israeli military and has access to all of our medical data. You okay with these fuckers colonising our NHS? Because I’m certainly not.

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