For some years, I’ve been able to get my prescriptions for free. This is just as well since my cupboard these days resembles a small pharmacy in itself and I’d probably have to resume work again if I had to pay for them all. But a conversation I had with an acquaintance at an actual pharmacy the other day reminded me that, actually, everyone’s prescriptions, not just in Scotland and Wales but in England, too, are free. Hang on, you may ask. The how come I had to pay nearly £30 for three items just the other day? It’s simple. Tax.
Now, the vast majority of prescriptions are free. Young people, old people, very sick people and pregnant people don’t have to pay, but everyone else does. £9.90 is a hefty wedge to fork out but it is important to realise, or remember if you did actually know this but had forgotten, that of this £9.90, £9.90 goes directly to the government. None of the money goes to support the local pharmacy and none of it, not a single penny, goes towards covering the cost of the medicine. So when you are ill and need a prescribed medicine, the pharmacy gives it to you for free but take £9.90 in tax from you, which it then hands to Jeremy C…Hunt.
My acquaintance hadn’t realised this, thinking as many folk do, that the prescription tax was actually a prescription charge, but this has been the case since war hero prime minister Winston Churchill introduced the tax in 1952. Labour’s Harold Wilson scrapped the tax in 1965, only to reintroduce it in 1968. Ever since then we’ve been taxed when we’ve been ill enough.
In Scotland and Wales, no one pays prescription taxes, so why should we? My guess is that successive governments have welcomed the extra revenue and have kept their heads down, quietly increasing the tax every year so that it’s nearly a tenner per item.
I’ve never understood why, when we have a National Health Service (NHS), which is free at the point of delivery, that we have to pay a tax on items that will hopefully make us feel better. We either have an NHS or we don’t and while we know that in Rishi Sunak’s ideal world, there would be no NHS, if we are going to have one, then let’s do it properly.
If you’re asking what we should tax instead to make up the shortfall, then I don’t have an answer. I do not have detailed information on how much income is generated through the prescription tax and frankly don’t care. That’s for politicians to work out. If the Great English Public don’t want to pay a prescription tax, and I believe they/we don’t, then get rid of it and earn your hefty salaries to come up with alternative sources for income. (Personally, I’d tax the parasitical private health vultures in order to pay for the cost of the prescription tax, but then I do loathe the very idea of fat cats making a fortune from people’s ill health.)
It’s the same with any tax, really. We complain about all taxes although we know why we pay for them. People even complain about having to pay taxes that don’t exist, like road tax, but that’s another story. I can understand being taxed on booze, petrol and certainly fags, but prescriptions that keep us alive? No. That’s one tax too many.
