When it comes to the subject of costs, one has to remember that one person’s cost saving is another’s lost profit. It all depends on who’s pulling the strings and where the influence is coming from. Test strip advice clearly isn’t about cost saving in any logical sense, because the strips would save the NHS goodness knows how much in amputations alone, and that’s before we even go down the rabbit hole of hypertension, heart disease, and everything else related to metabolic syndrome. For every penny the NHS saves on test strips, it probably costs them a pound to treat the consequences with surgery and pharmaceuticals. Sadly there are forces at work who have an interest in things staying this way. The NHS itself, as a system, is an innocent victim of capitalism.