The actor and comedian is a staunch supporter of the NHS (Picture: Slaven Vlasic/Getty Images)
Rob Delaney has delivered a blistering attack on attempts made to privatise the NHS, calling it a ‘disgusting operation’.
The American comedian, who is best known for creating and starring in Channel 4’s Catastrophe alongside Sharon Horgan, and his wife Leah lost their two-year-old son in January 2018.
Henry was diagnosed with a brain tumour just after his first birthday, with the cancer returning following surgery to remove the tumour.
Since then, Delaney has spoken about Henry and his family’s experience with the NHS on several occasions, revealing more of his personal grief in his new book A Heart That Works.
The 45-year-old is a firm supporter of the NHS and the care Henry received, after his son spent 14 months in two London hospitals and had 13 nurses attend his memorial service.
Admitting that attempting to secure healthcare in his native US ‘comes with stomach-curdling fear’, he praised the NHS in a new interview as something that ‘unifies everybody in practice and in spirit’ around the ‘imperfect’ nature of the human body, which is inevitably ‘going to fail in various ways’.
Delaney is best known for Channel 4 sitcom Catastrophe, the fourth season of which he wrote after he discovered his son Henry was going to die (Picture: Mark Johnson/Channel 4)
Addressing attempts to privatise the UK’s public healthcare system, Delaney then shared his dismay.
‘You’re just putting on a thing whose only job is to siphon money away from it, and into the pockets of CEOs and C-suite w**kers and investors,’ he told The Guardian.
‘Why? They add nothing. Literally nothing. They don’t deliver care more efficiently. Any idiot can figure that out. So why build an office tower full of a**holes in between you and your healthcare?’
American-born Delaney also spoke of the fear that came with navigating the healthcare system in the US (Picture: Brian J Ritchie/Hotsauce/Rex/Shutterstock)
It’s a disgusting operation,’ he added. ‘Any building related to private healthcare needs to be razed, and the earth where it stood needs to be salted.’
He has previously voiced his support of the NHS in his own indomitable style by saying in his 2019 stand-up special Jackie: ‘If the NHS was a d**k, I would suck that d**k.’
The writer and actor also spoke of how he and his sister were drawn closer in grief after her husband killed himself while Henry was ill, acknowledging that there ‘would be distance between us’ if they weren’t both mourning their own loss and ‘each other’s respective guy-who-died’.
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In February, Delaney marked 20 years of sobriety and reflected on his ‘unrecognisable’ life, which saw him meet his wife, have children and ‘pursue the career that I really wanted to’.
The Irish-American actor, who was born in Boston, Massachusetts, has also said being sober allowed him to fully grieve the death of his son.
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Delaney is a vocal supporter of the NHS, following his late son Henry’s treatment.