So the coalition of Cameron and Clegg want to privatise OUR health service
They now seem to be the only two people who for some reason want this to go through.
Not doubt this was discussed by them (the Tories) and their backers on some yacht somewhere while they plotted with R.Murdoch and others while in opposition. So mean to steamroller it through in any event while they can.
Backbench Tories who remember Thatcher and the Poll Tax (another bill that had little support) riots would well remember that period, and how they tested that bill for a year on
the Scots - and that is no doubt now one reason why Scottish people now hate the English and want to split.
Even those who support this bill must see that this government has no mandate for it because Cameron said during the last campaign that there would be no top down reorganisation of the NHS, and, to me strangly, people actually believed him.
We did not vote for this!
I think if they want to privatise the NHS they put it to the people to vote in a general election
Rememer this is gonna cost £6bn and M.Portillo on TV last night said most tories dont understand the bill and really the only thing
they want is the 'increased competion' bit (a phrase that usually means eventual privatisation), not the supposed savings of 4% pa
Your thoughts please
They are some petitions to sign on line if you wanna, and I believe a rally is planned in London opposing the bill on 7th March 2012
NHS -privatisation!
Re: NHS -privatisation!
Not so sure about Claggy, think he's very much caught as "junior coalition partner" on this - it's not a "Natural" Lib Dem policy. However it is right up the alley of Cameron and his Eton mess...
Possibly the most dangerous bill proposed in years, I'm surprised it hasn't attracted the kind of resistance the Poll Tax did. Or do we just not care so much anymore?
Possibly the most dangerous bill proposed in years, I'm surprised it hasn't attracted the kind of resistance the Poll Tax did. Or do we just not care so much anymore?
Re: NHS -privatisation!
BigFoz wrote:Not so sure about Claggy, think he's very much caught as "junior coalition partner" on this - it's not a "Natural" Lib Dem policy. However it is right up the alley of Cameron and his Eton mess...
Possibly the most dangerous bill proposed in years, I'm surprised it hasn't attracted the kind of resistance the Poll Tax did. Or do we just not care so much anymore?
It's a bit harder to explain to everyone why it's so dangerous.
One thing that's often glossed over is that most GPs are not employed by the NHS. I'll repeat that because it comes as a surprise to some people:
Most GPs are not employed by the NHS.
They are independent partnerships who are contracted to provide GP services. The Bill proposes to give most of the budget to one of the contractors to decide who to buy services from, many of which services are provided by those very contractors.
Possible conflict of interest?
Re: NHS -privatisation!
I think that Blair got there first. Fairly firm New Labour committment. And they set the framework for it to happen.
Re: NHS -privatisation!
The NHS has been being stealthily privitised for years. And it is dangerous. Long term, the UK is in danger of losing one of it's great public benefits.
I can explain quite easily why privitisation is dangerous. The example is the USA (which Cameron seems to think is a good example
)
Health care is an utter shambles in the USA (I'd use rude words if this weren't a family forum). People in the UK complain about things like waiting to get knee replacement surgery. How about if you had to pay for it? What then? What if you had to pay hundreds of pounds every month for prescription medication. Or buy any disability aids that you needed (unless you were lucky enough to benefit form a charity).
Middle class Americans with professional jobs pay tens of thousands of dollars every year in excess payments, medical insurance payments, prescription medication, and things called 'out of benefit' services (that just means the insurance company won't pay).
They accept this because they believe that a national health system will lead them down the road to the great evil of socialism (okay; slightly sarcastic, but with some truth in it). The American health system isn't, by any means a good example.
I can explain quite easily why privitisation is dangerous. The example is the USA (which Cameron seems to think is a good example
)Health care is an utter shambles in the USA (I'd use rude words if this weren't a family forum). People in the UK complain about things like waiting to get knee replacement surgery. How about if you had to pay for it? What then? What if you had to pay hundreds of pounds every month for prescription medication. Or buy any disability aids that you needed (unless you were lucky enough to benefit form a charity).
Middle class Americans with professional jobs pay tens of thousands of dollars every year in excess payments, medical insurance payments, prescription medication, and things called 'out of benefit' services (that just means the insurance company won't pay).
They accept this because they believe that a national health system will lead them down the road to the great evil of socialism (okay; slightly sarcastic, but with some truth in it). The American health system isn't, by any means a good example.
“In some ways, it is easier to be a dissident, for then one is without responsibility.”
― Nelson Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom
― Nelson Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom
Re: NHS -privatisation!
The dental part of the NHS is pretty much privatised in Carmarthen as there are no NHS dentists available, just private ones.
Yma o Hyd
Re: NHS -privatisation!
meic wrote:The dental part of the NHS is pretty much privatised in Carmarthen as there are no NHS dentists available, just private ones.
Same up in the rural North
Though I've found an effective route to getting listed as a NHS dental patient, is to pay the dentist a "backhander" I.e. break a tooth off while off on the bike, pay a fortune to have the dentist fix it privately and then mysteriously accept the offer of becoming a "NHS patient" post repair (At a dental surgery, which like all others, has no room for new "NHS patients, but makes room for those who can prove they're worth it"
It's a route I've used twice, though the second time it was simply a private checkup, xray and clean, which got me onto the NHS list
Re: NHS -privatisation!
Let's not forget that this is not a new thing and that much of the NHS has already been privatised by NuLabour, but they simply gave it away to the Private Sector.
Any PFI Hospital is now in reality a tenant of a Private Sector company and will have the majority of non-clinical services provided by that company at a named price with no option to tender, take a cheaper option or even in some cases dictate the level of service.
Another instance a scanning system for cancer (amongst other diseases). It enables diagnosis and also staging with superb accuracy.
However if your local Hospital wants to build one for your needs they have one small problem....
NuLabour decided to give the contract for provision of PET CT on a national basis to Alliance Medical and InHealth, dividing the country between the two. YOur local hospital could try and survive by doing research and private work, but they could not scan a cancer patient!
If they do wish to open such a scanner and do NHS patients they would have to make compensatory payments to the private company for doing so. SO NuLabour's concept means that the NHS not only pays the cost of the scan, but then pays the private company for NOT performing the scan!
Then we have the farce of the Independent Sector Treatment Centres. Another NuLabour decision. They gave "minimum treatment leves" in other words once again the Private Sector is being paid for work it will never perform. In some cases (Manhester) the ISTC only provided 51% of the work it was paid to do! IN 2009 it was estimated the value of work NOT Carried out by the Private Sector, but paid for was in the region of 35 million pounds!
Any PFI Hospital is now in reality a tenant of a Private Sector company and will have the majority of non-clinical services provided by that company at a named price with no option to tender, take a cheaper option or even in some cases dictate the level of service.
Another instance a scanning system for cancer (amongst other diseases). It enables diagnosis and also staging with superb accuracy.
However if your local Hospital wants to build one for your needs they have one small problem....
NuLabour decided to give the contract for provision of PET CT on a national basis to Alliance Medical and InHealth, dividing the country between the two. YOur local hospital could try and survive by doing research and private work, but they could not scan a cancer patient!
If they do wish to open such a scanner and do NHS patients they would have to make compensatory payments to the private company for doing so. SO NuLabour's concept means that the NHS not only pays the cost of the scan, but then pays the private company for NOT performing the scan!
Then we have the farce of the Independent Sector Treatment Centres. Another NuLabour decision. They gave "minimum treatment leves" in other words once again the Private Sector is being paid for work it will never perform. In some cases (Manhester) the ISTC only provided 51% of the work it was paid to do! IN 2009 it was estimated the value of work NOT Carried out by the Private Sector, but paid for was in the region of 35 million pounds!
Re: NHS -privatisation!
It's all a question of money. Who makes how much out of whom, and how can those whose only ethic is making money, make more money out of those who are most vulnerable.
Make all healthcare private - then it'll make more profit for the wealthy, the poorer sections of society won't be able to afford it and they'll die before they qualify for a pension. Then the same investors can pocket their bit of pension fund.
And, if you're a rich entrepeneur, you'll see an opening to make people ill so that they'll have to spend their money on the healthcare from which you make a profit, so you invest in tobacco, alchohol, junk food production et al, and then you persuasively advertise them and get rich out of selling them to people who you haven't educated to know better, and people will get ill. Then you get rich out of supposedly making them better.
If you can see an opening to make money out of education, then you'll invest in that, taking care not to educate the punters to know better than to smoke, get drunk, eat deep-fried lard fritters.
Then you can privatise the energy industry, so that it ceases to have, as it's prime function, the supply of heating to the people and takes on a new prime function as a source of supply of money to the directors and shareholders. Then you greedily put prices up so that you get even more money out of those who can afford it, and the elderly who can't afford it will die, so that you can plunder their pension funds.
And so it goes on - and, whilst I'm not any kind of party political animal, I do mentally record what I've seen around me down the years, and the retreat from the slow progress towards a just and fair society all started with Thatcher (pardon the bad language).
Make all healthcare private - then it'll make more profit for the wealthy, the poorer sections of society won't be able to afford it and they'll die before they qualify for a pension. Then the same investors can pocket their bit of pension fund.
And, if you're a rich entrepeneur, you'll see an opening to make people ill so that they'll have to spend their money on the healthcare from which you make a profit, so you invest in tobacco, alchohol, junk food production et al, and then you persuasively advertise them and get rich out of selling them to people who you haven't educated to know better, and people will get ill. Then you get rich out of supposedly making them better.
If you can see an opening to make money out of education, then you'll invest in that, taking care not to educate the punters to know better than to smoke, get drunk, eat deep-fried lard fritters.
Then you can privatise the energy industry, so that it ceases to have, as it's prime function, the supply of heating to the people and takes on a new prime function as a source of supply of money to the directors and shareholders. Then you greedily put prices up so that you get even more money out of those who can afford it, and the elderly who can't afford it will die, so that you can plunder their pension funds.
And so it goes on - and, whilst I'm not any kind of party political animal, I do mentally record what I've seen around me down the years, and the retreat from the slow progress towards a just and fair society all started with Thatcher (pardon the bad language).
Re: NHS -privatisation!
karlt wrote:...............Possible conflict of interest?
No, there's no conflict of interest - they're interested in themselves - in getting richer.
There may be a conflict between what they say and what they'll do, however...........
Re: NHS -privatisation!
It's often said (especially in the madder sections of the UK press) that the main problem with cost in the NHS is all the "management and consultants" (not Medical consultants...). How does moving from 200 or so centres of management (Health Trusts) to 60,000 centres of management (GP Surgeries) address that? Every GP surgery will need to have extra managers and admins to run the surgery and manage the processes, buy the services from NHS, sell them to patients, decide what treatments they can / cannot afford to offer. So instead 20,000 admins and managers, we will end up with 600,000. And the money for those will have to come from the NHS budget - that's an awful lot of treatment not being done for the same money. If GPs are running the service, how long before chronically ill folks are told to go elsewhere as they've used their allocation for the year?
I grew up for a while in SA, and also lived in the US - The NHS is a far better system than those, and if you added up what folks in those countries actually spend per annum, I bet it's more than the NHS budget... I just don't see where the savings are in this - all you're doing is demoralising the staff, creating rampant costs, profit based treatment, people unable to afford treatment, just for political dogma. The international medical companies must be salivating - they'll gradually hoover up all the independent practices over the next 20 years until the whole thing is run by 4 or 5 super sized conglomerates, all paying enormous bonuses and offering poor service.
My folks recently moved back from SA because they could no longer afford medical treatments, after years of putting things off until next year's allocation. It's no way to live. Luckily they lived and worked here long enough before we emigrated to be paid up on NI.
I grew up for a while in SA, and also lived in the US - The NHS is a far better system than those, and if you added up what folks in those countries actually spend per annum, I bet it's more than the NHS budget... I just don't see where the savings are in this - all you're doing is demoralising the staff, creating rampant costs, profit based treatment, people unable to afford treatment, just for political dogma. The international medical companies must be salivating - they'll gradually hoover up all the independent practices over the next 20 years until the whole thing is run by 4 or 5 super sized conglomerates, all paying enormous bonuses and offering poor service.
My folks recently moved back from SA because they could no longer afford medical treatments, after years of putting things off until next year's allocation. It's no way to live. Luckily they lived and worked here long enough before we emigrated to be paid up on NI.
Re: NHS -privatisation!
BigFoz wrote:................just for political dogma. The international medical companies must be salivating ..............
Absolutely. ......and will you find that the politicians so keen on the proposed changes are the ones with financial interests in the companies that are salvinating..........?
Re: NHS -privatisation!
I've no objection to NHS work being outsourced to private companies.
There are two main reasons for this.
1. People directly employed by the government tend to be very expensive. For some reason, they seem to get good pay for their skill level, superb pensions, shorter than average working weeks, above average holiday entitlements and extra days off after some bank holidays too. They also retire earlier than the rest of the population and take more time off for sickness. Thes facts don't just apply to skilled or stressed public servants, but also to office staff, administrators and people doing routine jobs comparable with many in the private sector.
2. Most of the things I use and need in my life are provided by private companies and I on the whole I am very satisfied. My house, my food, my car, my bikes, the aeroplanes I use, my gadgets etc etc are of good quality, safe and reliable. I see no reason why health care cannot be provided efficiently and well by private companies too.
Too often when we hear the phrase 'our NHS', it is spoken by an employee of the NHS. Unfortunately many of these employees do seem to behave as if they are the NHS rather than mere employees of it, and forget that it exists primarily to provide healthcare, not amenable jobs for them.
There are two main reasons for this.
1. People directly employed by the government tend to be very expensive. For some reason, they seem to get good pay for their skill level, superb pensions, shorter than average working weeks, above average holiday entitlements and extra days off after some bank holidays too. They also retire earlier than the rest of the population and take more time off for sickness. Thes facts don't just apply to skilled or stressed public servants, but also to office staff, administrators and people doing routine jobs comparable with many in the private sector.
2. Most of the things I use and need in my life are provided by private companies and I on the whole I am very satisfied. My house, my food, my car, my bikes, the aeroplanes I use, my gadgets etc etc are of good quality, safe and reliable. I see no reason why health care cannot be provided efficiently and well by private companies too.
Too often when we hear the phrase 'our NHS', it is spoken by an employee of the NHS. Unfortunately many of these employees do seem to behave as if they are the NHS rather than mere employees of it, and forget that it exists primarily to provide healthcare, not amenable jobs for them.
Re: NHS -privatisation!
blackbike wrote:I've no objection to NHS work being outsourced to private companies.
There are two main reasons for this.
1. People directly employed by the government tend to be very expensive. For some reason, they seem to get good pay for their skill level, superb pensions, shorter than average working weeks, above average holiday entitlements and extra days off after some bank holidays too. They also retire earlier than the rest of the population and take more time off for sickness. Thes facts don't just apply to skilled or stressed public servants, but also to office staff, administrators and people doing routine jobs comparable with many in the private sector.
2. Most of the things I use and need in my life are provided by private companies and I on the whole I am very satisfied. My house, my food, my car, my bikes, the aeroplanes I use, my gadgets etc etc are of good quality, safe and reliable. I see no reason why health care cannot be provided efficiently and well by private companies too.
Too often when we hear the phrase 'our NHS', it is spoken by an employee of the NHS. Unfortunately many of these employees do seem to behave as if they are the NHS rather than mere employees of it, and forget that it exists primarily to provide healthcare, not amenable jobs for them.
Despite the fact that I dont work for the NHS or have any connection with any one who does, I happen to think that this is a good thing. What is the point of having a rich country if the people working in it are kept poor?
As for more sicktime, what do you expect if your job is mixing with the sick?
Yma o Hyd
Re: NHS -privatisation!
Point 1 is widely debated and it's hard to get any real solid conclusions one way or the other due to difficulties of comparison. Most of the traditionally really badly paid jobs, like cleaning, are contracted out which raises the average within the public sector, and lowering the averages within the private sector as they now have these low paid people.
In the case of health care, I find it vanishingly unlikely that private doctors are cheaper than NHS ones.
Point 2 - where it's provided privately it costs more - the US is the classic example where health care costs twice as much per head as it does here. The current system provides very good value for money, and there are no obvious models out there where privatised health care shows better value.
In the case of health care, I find it vanishingly unlikely that private doctors are cheaper than NHS ones.
Point 2 - where it's provided privately it costs more - the US is the classic example where health care costs twice as much per head as it does here. The current system provides very good value for money, and there are no obvious models out there where privatised health care shows better value.