Widescale charges planned as privatisation bites into NHS funds

It seems large numbers of the population still don’t understand that their Conservative Government is scrapping the tax-funded National Health Service in England, in favour of a model in which the individual pays.

This would signal a return to the bad days before 1948, when most people were too poor to be able to afford any medical care at all and disease was widespread and went untreated. It’s what your Conservative Government wants, folks!

One reason David Cameron, Andrew Lansley, Jeremy Hunt and the rest of them wanted private companies to take NHS funding was because much of this money would then be neutralised as profit for those firms – firms in which many MPs and Lords have personal stakes. Get rid of the privateers and you free up more money for the service.

This would also end the wasteful duplication of effort created by a fake ‘health marketplace’ that the Conservative Government wants you to believe drives down prices but in fact throws money away and turns medicine into a postcode lottery.

What are you going to do about it?

Ministers will have to consider charging patients for seeing a GP, attending A&E, and using the food, power and water of hospitals, unless better long-term solutions for funding the NHS can be found, public finance experts have warned.

Contributions towards the cost of treatments and patients taking out health insurance are among other options that must be on the table if the comprehensive spending review in November fails to address the issue, the Chartered Institute of Public Finance (Cipfa) says in a briefing.

The document says that the hope of NHS leaders to save £22bn over five years to 2020-21 is optimistic and does not take account of David Cameron’s pledge to increase seven-day services nor of the introduction of the new national living wage.

Source: NHS patients may face widescale charges, warns financial thinktank | Society | The Guardian

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13 Comments

  1. Roland Laycock August 5, 2015 at 12:45 pm - Reply

    Most people have no knowledge of what it was like before the NHS they just accept the party line

    • Gary Burley August 5, 2015 at 1:45 pm - Reply

      so that’ll be me dead within a year just for being a type 1 diabetic and my son will have to see the wholething and be helpless to do anything, in harry smiths time pre 1948 when the tories last did this. poor people died from cancer without any treatment and so di anybody else who had a lifelong illness. all those asthma sufferers, all those aids patients, anybody who has luekemia, this will effectively murder you by proxy

    • john kettle August 5, 2015 at 7:06 pm - Reply

      They only need to look at the headstones in their local churchyard pre-1948 to see what life (or early death) was like for those the masses.

  2. Richard Irish August 5, 2015 at 3:23 pm - Reply

    Everybody should read Harry’s Last Stand by Harry Leslie Smith.

  3. kath breheney August 5, 2015 at 3:46 pm - Reply

    Ok, how do we go about demanding/forcing this corrupt Gov stand down?

    • Mike Sivier August 5, 2015 at 4:41 pm - Reply

      With great difficulty, it seems. Best way is to push for by-elections, which means digging up dirt on Tory MPs, throwing it at them and making it stick. Unpleasant but necessary. Then when they resign, we have to make sure Tories don’t win, until we reach the point where they don’t have a majority. Then they must be prevented from pushing through any new legislation until they give up.
      That’s the peaceful way.

  4. jeffrey davies August 5, 2015 at 3:58 pm - Reply

    there will be many who cant afford unums policy there be more culling of the stock by the cons but one only got to look at the yanky set up the tax payers get billed by these companys 3and a half times more than it costs to run our nhs speaks for itself its robbing time for the tories

  5. Dave Plant August 5, 2015 at 4:05 pm - Reply

    The political establishment is working towards “reforming” the NHS into an insurance-based system, along the lines of healthcare provision in the USA (ignoring the fact that of course we already pay for the NHS through national insurance contributions). This is primarily for the benefit of insurance companies, not patients, not health professionals.

    As to what we can do about it, I would say first of all that everyone should be aware of the National Health Action Party, which exists purely to oppose the political reforms to the NHS, and do everything possible to support their campaigns and help spread the word about what our politicians are planning behind our backs.

    http://nhap.org/

    Secondly, I would say vote for Jeremy Corbyn in the Labour leadership election. I believe that he is the only candidate who can be trusted to oppose plans to destroy our NHS. The NHA really isn’t much more than a pressure group. We need Labour MPs to stand up and fight for the NHS, not roll over like most of them did over the welfare bill. After all, who created the NHS in the first place?

  6. Nick Fourbanks August 5, 2015 at 5:01 pm - Reply

    As i have always said mike you can’t believe anything the government says so in reality you’re stuffed

    If they privatize it in any under hand way i will be the first to know as my daughter works very very deep within it

    All i can say of my own findings is that it is riddled with staff that should not even be there as their personalities are not what i would call satisfactory

    Now some may say does that matter. Well it does in such a large environment as a poor service brings about a lot of attention

    I do not see any concern at surgeon level and their teams. The same for the ambulance staff

    The overall standard of nurses is very variable and needs much more work in getting the right sort of staff

    We have a shortage of nurses and in the desperation to get the numbers right all sorts of people have decided I will have a go so to speak when in reality they will never have the proper skills as you are born with them the same as my wife who is a natural carer

    The admin side is very poor and very few of this group of staff should be there as the role of admin is to support all of the staff when in reality, they offer no support at all causing the main staff members to work well outside their allotted shift and the public are just a pain as the beds are not available

    They do not have the best interest of the hospital at its heart so therefore this is not the best place to be working, which leads to the shortage of staff and what are worse graduates no longer wanting to go into nursing in the first place

    My belief is that the NHS will be private within the next ten years and only those who are very ill will be able to use it free with everyone else having to pay a vast sum of money and that my friends are my personal findings and am sure the government also reading this will come to the same conclusion

    If you had the right sort of staff across all areas then it could be avoided but good decent staff would never be available in these sorts of numbers

    You have to have the right sort of staff so that the day of work is enjoyable and if you don’t everything else starts to fall down around you as after all this is not any old job it’s about a group of people with a life ambition do well for others and sadly with the selfish personalities we have today on offer that’s never going to happen

  7. chriskitcher August 5, 2015 at 5:23 pm - Reply

    I am pleased to see that “Jezwecan” has made it great on the Internet. Having regard to the Five Star Movement in Italy lets consider how we can attack this rotten government using the web to attack the Tories. If we don’t on the left the right wing will.

  8. casalealex August 5, 2015 at 9:37 pm - Reply

    http://socialinvestigations.blogspot.co.uk/p/key-facts-of-lords-and-mps-connections.html

    Key Facts of interests in healthcare
    The research looking into Lords and MPs connections to private healthcare through the register of interests is complete. Below are listed some of the key findings. Research into the murky and dangerous Health and Social Care bill is ongoing and more facts will be added here as and when they arise. 

  9. casalealex August 5, 2015 at 9:39 pm - Reply

    http://socialinvestigations.blogspot.co.uk/2012/02/nhs-privatisation-compilation-of.html

    NHS privatisation: Compilation of financial and vested interests. This represents the latest list of recent or present financial links between parliamentarians and individuals or companies involved in private healthcare.

    The list is up-to-date as of March 2nd 2014. The previous list is representative of who had these interests when they voted on the Health and Social Care bill, helping it become an Act.

    MPs and Lords are able to vote on legislation, even when they have a direct financial interest. This happened with the Health and Social Care Act, which saw the NHS being forced into a world of an external market. The legislation was written for industry, by industry and is part of the overall plan for its demise and the eventual takeover by private health insurance companies.

    Not our words, but those of Oliver Letwin and John Redwood in their 1988 publication for the Centre for Policy Studies, ‘Britain’s Biggest Enterprise.’

    The rules are not fit for purpose – it is not enough to simply register your interests and then vote as you like. Local councillors must abide by a stricter regime, which is imposed on them by parliament. Why should we the public be placed in a position whereby we have to take the politicians word for it that despite their interest, their vote was in the best interest of the public? It is time that parliament ended this hypocrisy.

    What point are the rules, if there is no punitive action when they get broken? Committees made up of parliamentarians decide the punishment of themselves. When a serious wrongdoing is committed, all that is often handed down is a suspension, while they are able to remain on as an MP, before being able to return to the fold. Resignations mean nothing to parliament, but a great deal to a public who rightfully see our political elite as a law unto themselves……

  10. hugosmum70 August 6, 2015 at 1:00 am - Reply

    well i save my GP a fair bit of money i would say. i have thin skin as such i am always catching myself especially on my arms. sometimes legs too,. at present i am sporting 3 mepore dressings on my left arm, one is an infected cracked elbow. so using Vaseline gauze dressings on that. the others a straight open scratch and a 3 corner tear………i do not ask for mepore dressings, Vaseline gauze, inodine, or or non allergenic tape. Elastoplast’s. cream applicators, test strips (type 2 diabetic)blood sugar test meters or lancets.i buy my own./ ive cut down on meds (with my GP’s consent, to only those we really feel are necessary. asthma sprays, heart spray, thyroid tablets, painkillers. antihistamines. and meds for acid reflux and 1 Metformin for diabetes type2. instead of the 2 they wanted me to take,it upset my IBS so i stopped one. informed them n was told ok thats fine. ugh? if its fine i obviously didn’t need that 2nd one. (do i need the other i ask myself?will see when my latest blood tests come back).. foot creams i buy myself too. they supply some IBS meds i buy others myself. if left to them i would also be on orchestral tablets even though my cholesterol levels have never been over the level they set.always under. i would have been on a heart regulator tablet. if i hadn’t persuaded them that my legs swelling with fluid was down to them. other tablets over the years that have been found unnecessary. .given just as a preventative. when no evidence i was heading for whatever those tablets were supposed to prevent. so yes ive probably saved the NHS a lot of money over the last few years and while i can I’ll continue to buy what i buy now. especially dressings. because ask them and you get a measly 2-3 single ones. in my case no use to me at all.this elbow is on going and will be for a while till i can get the hard skin softened up till it disappears again.

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