Same Storm, Very Different Boats: Why We Need to Talk About Health Care Inequality

The purpose of this article is to stress that every patient deserves the very best care, not just the privileged few with the "right" surname or the biggest bank balance.

High-profile testimonies, including Charles’s address, can help draw attention to the disease but they often miss a crucial point. Cancer patients are not in the same boat — they are in the same storm.

The illness may be shared, but the conditions are not. People face cancer from very different positions: some with immediate access to world-class care, complete financial security, and institutional support; others while navigating waiting lists, financial stress, job insecurity, and uncertainty.

Recognising this difference does not deny anyone’s suffering. It acknowledges that inequality shapes how illness is experienced and endured. If we are serious about compassion, we must be honest about the unequal boats people are forced to weather the same storm in.

1. Same illness ≠ same situation

It’s true that cancer does not discriminate biologically but outcomes, experiences, and burdens absolutely do discriminate socially. Saying Charles is “in the same boat” as other cancer patients ignores that Illness happens within material conditions. Those conditions shape risk, pain, fear, delay, and survival.

Two people can have the same disease and be in entirely different realities.

2. Access changes the meaning of illness

Charles has, immediately and without barriers:

1. Instant diagnosis (no waiting lists)

2. The world’s best specialists on demand

3. Private facilities, privacy, and comfort

4. No financial stress (the Dispatches documentary revealed that he has made over £11 million in profit from our NHS)

5. No job insecurity

6. No housing risk

7. No childcare, transport, or caregiving gaps

8. No need to navigate bureaucracy while ill

Most cancer patients must also endure:

1. Long waits for scans or referrals

2. Uncertainty over treatment approval

3. Financial anxiety

4. Work penalties or job loss (some people can not afford to NOT work, so have to keep working inspite of pain and suffering)

5. Caregiving responsibilities while sick

6. Psychological stress from precarity

That doesn’t make his cancer “less real” — it makes his burden profoundly lighter.

3. “Same boat” erases inequality

The phrase “same boat” is the problem. A more accurate comparison would be:

Same ocean, very different vessels

One person is navigating cancer on a luxury ship with a full medical crew and guaranteed rescue if anything goes wrong.

Our loved ones are navigating cancer in overcrowded lifeboats with limited supplies, hoping the system notices them in time.

Calling that “the same boat” silences structural injustice and turns inequality into sentimentality

4. Privilege doesn’t cancel suffering — it changes risk

This is the key ethical distinction.

You can say, “privilege doesn’t mean you don’t suffer. It means suffering carries less risk of catastrophe.”

For many patients, cancer threatens their survival, livelihood, their family’s stability and future security.

For Charles, his livelihood, housing, care, and status are untouched

That difference matters morally and politically.

5. Why this matters in an anti-monarchy context

The monarchy rests on the idea that some lives are institutionally protected more than others by birth and bloodline superiority.

Pointing out unequal medical experience is not cruelty, nor is it not denying illness. It is highlighting how inherited power insulates people from harm.

Our critique is about systems, not sympathy. We can respect his recovery and still say “no one should be protected from illness outcomes by ancestry.”

So What Do We Want?

1. For Wes Streeting and the Labour Government to stop privatising our NHS and putting it at risk.

2. For adequate investment and funding to drastically reduce patient waiting lists and to improve cancer treatment for everyone.

Cancer is the same. The safety net is not. Acknowledging unequal access to care doesn’t deny suffering — it refuses to pretend privilege doesn’t matter. Our goal is for everyone to have their own yacht and medical team to weather the brutal storm of cancer.