By community correspondent Andrew Robertson The NHS is one of the world’s biggest employers with around 1.5 million employees. To put things in perspective that’s around the same amount of people in the entire Chinese army. The Conservatives want to “fix the NHS” ,while the Labour party want to continue funding an great institution which simply can not sustain itself. Both are admirable ideals, whilst the problem remains that this organisation will remain a black hole in our nation’s finances.

At its inception the NHS was supposed to financed through our national insurance contributions. Many of us (if lucky enough) receive our pay checks having paid this mysterious tax. So what does it get us? It does help pay for those of us who have no income, give them access to healthcare and in a civilized society we must accept that more fortunate people should help those less fortunate.

The problem remains in that these national insurance contributions are not nearly enough to continue funding an institution the size of the Chinese army and unfortunately national insurance has never been tax neutral in terms of our national budget.

Consequently the treasury has to impose greater taxation to close the deficit. Many of the big four audit firms (alongside the national audit office) are brought in to try and improve efficiency and value for the tax-payer. Targets and efficiency have become the hallmark of the Labour government trying to fix an institution which is completely unique. The ridiculous key performance indicators used like number of beds occupied or number of patients treated seems ludicrous. You can not really differentiate between a gunshot victim and a small graze. Clearly one is more serious than the other. Ascribing efficiency in terms of say number of patients treated, which looks good for the bean counters and a report to the House of Commons but drastically fails to address the real operational issues is just a hopeless waste of time and money.

The NHS is just one government department that is in a total mess alongside many others including a large number of quangos. We must close our national deficit and reduce public sector spending which has spiralled out of control under the Labour government. People are blaming bankers for the mess we are in but two years ago no-one cared as everyone was making money by becoming overnight property developers. The real issue was that modern banking had changed enormously from 1997 during the Asian banking crisis. The new banking model created was one where our financial institutions had become so dependant on each other and their finances so interwoven that when one started to fail the rest really felt the pain. The problem was that the regulators were struggling to keep up with this new model. While everyone was making money, what politician would ever attempt to change a system that was clearly working very well.

It is the young professionals that will be paying for our current budget deficit for years to come. In Indonesia in the wake of the Kobe earthquake, the Barings bank scandal and at the height of the Asian financial crisis in the 1990’s people began rioting simply because young people could not deal with the budget deficit, unemployment and high taxes that had beset the country. Young people and young professionals in the UK have very little voice in Parliament and the government does not seem to care. In corporate UK they struggle to build a career for themselves and even get on to the property ladder. According to the office of national statistics 2.9 million people between the ages of 20-34 are still living with their parents. With an election looming all attention seems to have turned either to the mum’s for the Conservative party or to the poor working class for the Labour party. In the meantime it is the young person's vote that is being forgotten while they have some how become very disenfranchised from society.

Political parties would do well to remember that while traditionally they have very low voter turnout, Bill Clinton won the 1993 election by a landslide simply because he knew all to well the power that young people have, once galvanized. Most of us do not have children, we work extremely hard trying to better ourselves and mostly for people that already do have children.

The problem in our society is that once you have a child you expect that the world somehow is indebted to your offspring. Parents seem to expect things and rules to be bent so that they can better serve their children. Whilst this argument holds some weight it is impossible in a democracy of equals to condone that parents should some how be given some higher status than people who have no children.

Young people have been hit hardest by the recession as they are the most expendable. Senior management in making redundancies have benignly spared those workers with children and dependents. Unemployment for young people has risen to one in six people below the age of 30. While children are indeed important this must be balanced with ensuring a future for young workers who will be closing the funding gap once existing parents are retired and their children are still becoming productive members of society.

The NHS is an army that young people are paying for and receive no benefit from. It must be stopped and financed in a fairer way, but no-one is listening or even cares about the forgotten young generation.