The NHS faces a slow death by propaganda. Don’t let it happen
Were you as horrified as I was when The Guardian – of all news outlets – headlined an article with the words, “Hospitals are massively overspending. But more money is not the answer”?
Hospitals are not “massively overspending”. If the money is being used to save lives, then they are not overspending at all.
The only people who could possibly imagine that a health service can overspend are Tories – because they are backward in their priorities; they revere money and consider human lives to be worthless.
NHS Million fixed the Guardian headline for its errant editors:
The NHS is not overspending, it is underfunded.
Please RT if you know there is a big difference.https://t.co/YVPeufjTmB
— NHS Million (@NHSMillion) June 2, 2018
Some armchair critics might want to suggest that hospitals are overspending because there isn’t enough money in the UK economy at the moment. This is, at best, a mistake. There is plenty of money – it is held in offshore bank accounts and other financial instruments owned by rich supporters of the Conservative Party.
A report out during the week said the NHS deficit is about £1 billion in the red. A huge sum of money, and twice as much as expected, yet nothing compared to the £3 billion we let the Duke of Westminster avoid in Tax through various trusts. This really can't go on.
— Rachael Swindon (@Rachael_Swindon) June 2, 2018
Anybody who wants to say that these people are entitled to the money they have should be reminded that wages have been pushed below subsistence level by the Tories over the last eight years. Fatcat businesspeople with offshore accounts, trusts or whatever should be made to pay a living wage to all employees before taking their massive cut to HMRC for a proper assessment of their tax obligation. Then they can do whatever they want with what’s left.
The increased amount of money that would then go to the Treasury could be used to reverse some of the nightmare statistics the Mirror published about Jeremy Hunt’s nightmarish career as the UK’s longest-serving Health Secretary.
A cursory glance at it shows that his decisions make no sense. Waiting times have increased hugely, yet Mr Hunt has cut the number of hospital beds by 7,000. This cannot make sense to anybody.
So to news outlets like The Guardian, our message should be clear:
Don’t give us your pro-Tory propaganda, please! Try reporting the facts instead.
Jeremy Hunt [became] the longest-serving Health Secretary in our history on Sunday.
And stats show his calamitous 2,099-day reign has seen soaring waiting times, cancelled ops, bed shortages and a 100,000 staff shortfall.
Mr Hunt was appointed on September 4 2012.
Since then the number of people waiting more than four hours in A&E is up 842 per cent. Then 9,022 people waited more than four hours – in March it was 76,054.
An extra 1.4 million people are on NHS waiting lists compared to 2012.
And the number of people waiting over two weeks for urgent cancer treatment has more than doubled from 53,738 in 2013 to 113,373 in 2018.
There are 7,000 fewer beds available in NHS hospitals now than in 2012
And bed occupancy at the end of last year was the highest recorded.
Stats also show the waiting time measure for consultant-led treatment is at 22 weeks, and has been above the 18-week target since early 2016.
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Hunt’s ambition is to destroy the NHS. People should wise-up to that fact.
I agree with all of this except the claim that Hunt’s decisions make no sense. I suspect that from his point of view things are going quite well. His aim is to defund, demoralise and discredit the NHS so the Tories can move to full-scale privatisation, allowing him and his buddies to make even more money out of people’s illness. The only thing standing between him and the destruction of this pinnacle of socialist achievement are the wonderful people working in the NHS, who struggle every day to keep it going despite him. We all need to start calling this out for what it is. In my view calling him incompetent or saying that his decisions make no sense misses the point.
I may have made the same point myself several times in the past.
As I was discussing the running of the NHS as a going concern, it seemed logical to criticise the Tory treatment of it in that context.
£1 Billion is not a lot of money. That is how much these right wing barlambs gave to the Irish Tories to keep themselves in power. How can this country stand and watch as people who work in offices are given free private health care, whilst the working people further down the right wing hierarchy have to suffer ever worsening medical care, medical care that they, like the rest of working people have paid for since 1947. Self centered cheating swines are all they are and ever have been. When they had their junior officers march decent hard working people into the land beside the Somme they proved themselves the epicentre of evil. Let’s get labour in Power and then play with the rules to push these bastards into killing machines and use their stolen wealth to wipe THEM out!
Overspending is a total fabrication, a government such as ours can never overspend, our government creates all the money in circulation. The Bank of England explains it like this, 97% of all money in circulation was issued through the private banks as loans. 3% was issued directly by the Bank of England as coins and notes issued over the counter or through ATMs.
Our national debt is also not debt as people envisage it to be, but is an expression of Britain’s savings, in that the Bank of England issues bonds covering the so called deficit, and pays it off each time a Bond matures. Our government is not a household and doesn’t have to borrow its own money, but bt issuing Bonds it also provides a saving opportunity, although that is also not necessary.
Our country unlike the EU, is not like a household, our government can spend directly into the econom or on public services, but neo-liberal politicians refuse to do so, because they serve the corporate sector not the people that elected them.