I am a dead man walking.

A private healthcare system will be my death sentence and yours too.

This morning at breakfast, I noticed that my bread had gone mouldy again before its best before date. The cost-of-living crisis, coupled with a never-ending succession of conservative governments' has made me a bit like that bread; I am mouldering before my time.

I feel like I am a dead man walking. But many of you are dead men walking too. Anyone who is poor, vulnerable, or just an average worker on an average wage fighting to keep their head above water in an economy rigged for the rich, is a dead man walking.

Our public healthcare system is collapsing all around us, and you can almost taste the dust debris from capitalism's wrecking ball smashing against socialised medicine.

From 2010 until his death in 2018, my dad spent his old age warning people not to make his past our future by allowing the creep of privatisation into public healthcare. It was his last stand, and he went down fighting for it to his last breath. But it did not matter. He may as well have been crying out loud in a bucket because he was loved and listened to by the many but was a nobody to the few.

Unless general strikes occur, and massive peaceful civil disobedience events are organised, in the spirit of Gandhi or Martin Luther King, public healthcare will be gone quicker than you can say Kaiser Permanente.

Next year, it will be a hundred years since my dad was born to poor working folk in a slum on the edge of a coal mine on the outskirts of Barnsley. Much did change since my dad came into this world by the guiding hand of a midwife that liked coarse shag cigarettes and harsh gin. We saw advances in technology and social attitudes as the Welfare State grew that was maintained, by a tax system that demanded everyone pay their fair share. However, around the time of Reagan and Thatcher; the notion of nations for the people and by the people stopped. It was when neo-liberalism began to drag ordinary workers, the vulnerable, and the disadvantaged back to a pre–Welfare State existence through the privatisation of their nation’s infrastructure. It took time, and our return to the past did not happen overnight. The one percent is a patient economic class, and understood, to remove hard-fought rights of the working and middle classes required careful long-term erosion. It took decades, but they just kept buying up news media platforms, publishing houses, television stations, and popular culture venues while funding politicians that could parrot their mantra that, like mother, “capitalism knows best.” So now outside of social media outrages from citizens, there is an inevitable consensus among the public that healthcare will go private. We are a bit like the French in 1940 knowing that the Nazis would soon be in Paris. Instead of mumbling to ourselves "C'est la vie," we shrug it all off with a capitulating, "shit happens."

Covid did not cause the end of public health care; it was just a convenient scapegoat like the Reichstag fire was for the Nazis to end democracy, in Germany. Few in the news media or even in opposition politics questioned the motivations of why governments whose politicians were funded by the 1% would take their side and keep the economy running at full throttle during the world’s worst pandemic since 1918. Governments removed their mask mandates without scientific reasoning because they told us people felt restricted with them on in stores and other indoor social gatherings.

It was bollocks. Removing mask mandates was about making people forget they lived in a time of plague and still do. Our leaders wanted their citizens to continue living their consumer lifestyle that the 1% needed to maintain their wealth and power.

We all started living on borrowed time; the moment our governments refused to pay our nurses and other healthcare workers a proper wage during this harsh economic age because life is short, and many nurses left for greener pastures. When those departed their work stations and the nurses that remained came down with covid because in the world outside hospitals; people still lived like there was no pandemic, the system snapped. Now, hospital emergency rooms are closing, paramedics have no facilities to take very ill patients, and surgeries are delayed. Rightly so, people fear they will die earlier than they should because the healthcare system is breaking apart like a ship being battered in a storm.

Politicians sense this fear and panic. But instead of taxing the wealthy to ensure everyone gets an equal shot at a good and healthy life, they mumble something about “the status quo not working.” They talk about all options on the table. But because our leaders are not our friends but the friends of big business, banks, and lobbyists, their answer is: that private enterprise can fix our healthcare system.

We are watching, in real-time, the end of public healthcare. We are witnessing our birthright willed to us, by the Greatest Generation, sold like it was scrap and the proceeds from the sale pocketed by the 1% and those that carry their baggage.

I won’t survive in a privatised healthcare system because I am barely surviving now. I may walk, on average, eight kilometres a day, but my healthy days are long gone. I had a heart attack at 42, and just a while back, I was struck by rectal cancer that compelled an oncological surgeon to order radiation therapy to kill cancer cells in my lymph nodes. Afterwards, I was opened like a tin of tuna to amputate cancer from my body. It was not a pleasant experience and left profound side effects. But it did allow me to live, and for which I am very thankful.

I still need to be observed closely and scanned every year for cancer recurrence because I will not be declared free of cancer for another three years. It seems my type of cancer which many endure, likes to come back like the monster in Stranger Things.

I have been so close to death many times, which is why I know that the rapid privatisation of healthcare services will put me closer to my grave than someone with wealth or good insurance. Even now in our current public healthcare system, I must pay for my heart medications and drugs to alleviate the symptoms caused by my cancer treatment. It is not thousands of dollars like my mum had to pay when she was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis in the 1990s. But it is still an amount that makes me go short on other essentials. When it comes time for my prescription renewals, I cut back on my grocery bill. I am not starving; nor do I have other dependents. So, it’s not a big deal. I also do the same when it is time for work to be done on my teeth because dental care isn't considered essential healthcare by the State. My reality isn’t unusual. It is the reality of millions of people in Canada, Britain, Australia and in the USA. Thanks to conservative politics and the centre's appeasement of capitalism, we are all dead men walking. I recognise this because, before the welfare state, my dad’s sister died from a treatable TB as she came from a working-class family who couldn’t afford the cost of treatment that may have saved her life. Instead, she died miserably at the age of nine in a workhouse infirmary. I am not overreacting when I say, many of us, me included, will find our lives shorter than they should have been because health care was turned into a commodity to further the one percent's pursuit of their pleasure. So, it is time to get pissed off and fight back before they steal our very own existence. I am running out of time and so are you.