The usual fate of monopolies. Monopolies are very poor at combating waste.
And of course, the NHS never had to deal with the likes of this until recently;
Aisha’s Pakistani-born parents, Mohammed and Barkat, are first cousins. There is fresh and growing evidence that marriage between relatives within the Pakistani community may be to blame – in part at least – for a dramatic rise in the number of children with genetic disorders being treated in British hospitals. Figures obtained by The Mail on Sunday under Freedom of Information laws reveal a huge challenge, not only for such communities, but also for the Health Service. And it comes with vast financial implications. The figures show that up to 20 per cent of the children treated for congenital problems in cities such as Sheffield, Glasgow and Birmingham are of Pakistani descent, a figure significantly greater than the background populations, which can be four per cent or lower.
DailyMail
But in general the NHS was not designed for current demographics.
This is fractally wrong.
Really. It's so wrong, it's hard to know where to start. It's almost impossible to overstate just how badly wrong this is.
The Daily Mail, well known for making shit up to pursue the xenophobic agenda that gets them the big audience and the big bucks, should never be trusted on any topic involving Muslims in the UK.
The NHS has been 'dealing with' sizable UK Muslim populations since its inception, coming as it did at the same time as the partition of India - large numbers of Indians from the areas that became Pakistan and East Pakistan (later Bangladesh), most of them Muslims, migrated to the UK in the late 1940s and early 1950s, just as the NHS was getting started. This influx grew even larger with the passage of the 1962 Commonwealth Immigrants Act; however the numbers of Muslims migrating to the UK dropped off after the British Nationality Act 1981 came into force in 1983, after which date, Commonwealth subjects from the former British Empire no longer had the automatic right to take up residency in the UK.
The genetic risks due to first cousins marrying are fairly small - according to Professor Alan Bittles, director for the centre for human genetics in Perth, Australia, the extra increased risk of death is 1.2%; while in terms of birth defects, the risks rise from about 2% in the general population to 4% when the parents are closely related. (
source)
Pakistanis form approximately 1.8% of the UK population; About half of Pakistanis marry a first cousin, so that's 0.9% of Britons; and in that population, there is a 4% incidence of birth defects, compared to 2% in the general population.
The UK population is about 65 million, so these first cousin marriages are responsible for increasing the number of people with birth defects in the UK from about 1.3 million to about 1.301 million. In other words, the worst case scenario is an added burden on the NHS of less than the rounding error in any reasonable statistics - and this "burden" is far from new, having been in place for the entire existence of the NHS.
In general, the NHS is designed for the demographics the country actually has (and planning includes estimates of expected demographic changes), and it has constantly and without difficulty responded to all manner of demographic changes throughout its existence; But even if we could accept, for the sake of argument, that first cousin marriages amongst Pakistani immigrants to the UK were a brand new phenomenon, their impact on the ability of the NHS to handle genetic disorders would be utterly minuscule - for every 1,300 patients they treated in the past, they would now have to find the resources to treat 1,301.
You really, really need to stop posting crap like this. It's not just wrong; It's so clearly and obviously wrong to anyone who takes a moment to think about it, that it indicates a total and callous disregard for the truth, in favour of a truly ugly and irrational xenophobia.
Reality exists, and pretending it doesn't, to the point of actually sharing utter drivel like this on a rationalist discussion board, is completely beyond the pale.
I certainly hope that anybody who read your post and thought "Hey, he might have a point there" is now deeply ashamed by the depth of their ignorance, and has resolved to never again accept as plausible, commentary from the Daily Mail, without a thorough investigation of its factual basis.
