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There’s Nothing Free About It: A Lesson in Government Delusion

by Ram ben Ze'ev


There’s Nothing Free About It: A Lesson in Government Delusion
There’s Nothing Free About It: A Lesson in Government Delusion

Today, I received a letter from the NHS—at first alarming, then simply aggravating. It wasn’t an invitation. It was a decree. I had been scheduled for an Abdominal Aortic Aneurysm Screening on 21 August 2025 at 9:30am. No consent requested. No conversation. Just a decision made somewhere in a bureaucratic maze that my body now belonged to their timetable.


The letter itself—a three-page A4 missive, plus an NHS pamphlet, all wrapped in a branded envelope—was an exercise in waste. A costly communication campaign for a medical appointment I didn’t ask for and didn’t want. And make no mistake: you paid for it.



To be courteous, I phoned the number listed to cancel. After the usual robotic ordeal of push-button menus and on-hold platitudes, I finally reached a woman who—rather than simply cancelling the appointment—interrogated me.


“Why do you want to cancel?” she asked. “Do you realise it’s free?”


At that point, I interrupted. “There’s nothing free about it.”


She argued back. “The government is paying for it.”


I corrected her. “The taxpayer is paying for it. Presumably, you’re a taxpayer. That means you’re paying. And while I appreciate your generous offer to fund my screening, I have no interest in paying for everyone else’s.”


Still, she persisted. “I don’t see why you won’t have the free screening.”


I asked her again—firmly—to cancel the appointment, and added that it troubled me that she truly believed the government had any money of its own. It doesn’t. It never has. Everything the government spends comes from the people. But the people have been trained to forget that.



This entire episode felt less like a medical service and more like the performance of a contract. The call centre interaction, the style of the letter, the clumsy persuasion tactics—all bore the fingerprints of a third-party provider. It would not surprise me in the least to learn that some smooth-talking contractor pitched this scheme to NHS officials, secured a multi-million-pound agreement, and greased a few internal wheels along the way. This is the quiet machinery of institutionalised grift: taxpayer funds funnelled through bureaucracy into private hands, all under the guise of “care.”


Meanwhile, actual care is increasingly out of reach. The NHS cannot provide timely GP access. It has replaced human interaction with an AI interface called “PATCHS”—a Frankenstein solution, as impersonal as it is inefficient—a name, I might add, lifted straight from the Patch Adams film as though humour might ease the decay. “Emergency referrals” are now routinely delayed by three weeks. And yet the NHS has the time, staff, and budget to mass-mail pre-scheduled screening appointments to men across the country who didn’t ask for them and don’t need them.



And let’s be clear: this screening will not prevent illness. At best, it detects an issue and feeds the patient back into the same broken system that failed to help in the first place.


This is not healthcare. This is bureaucratic performance. It is political theatre paid for by citizens and performed by those too comfortably ignorant to question the script.


There is nothing free about it. And until people relearn that basic economic truth, the system will keep extracting from the public while selling back the illusion of generosity.


>>>> BUY ME A COFFEE <<<<


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