INDEX
Wednesday January 3, 2018
NHS privatisation stage three
Many people will think the Government is lying when it says that it has long planned to halt all non-urgent NHS operations and appointments for the entire month of January see Independent and many other newspapers . After all (they will point out), you can easily tell health secretary Jeremy Hunt is lying by the fact that his lips move. But on this occasion he is telling the truth. The move is part of a long planned strategy. It is stage three in a plan to privatise health care in the UK, or at least to make it more or less impossible for the poor, the elderly and the under-privileged to get health care whilst the better off speed through a first class system based on their ability to pay or to afford private insurance. Stage one was the creation of the internal (or better named infernal) market. The object of this was to make the system hopelessly bureaucratic and ridiculously expensive. One of the points of having a national health service free at the point of need, was that there was no purpose in invoices, financial records or wasteful competition. All that simplicity ended with the infernal market. Stage two was the handing over of billions of pounds of public assets to crooks, charlatans and tax dodgers in the form of the contracting out of whole chunks of the NHS. Stage three is the worst so far. Private sector health insurance is very bad at handling emergency health care, for all sorts of reasons. What it can do, to the satisfaction of the well off who want to queue jump, is handle planned medical care such as hip replacements or plastic surgery. It can't do it as cheaply as the NHS (which is by all accounts, amongst the cheapest and most efficient systems in the world). But that doesn't matter much to people who either have the money in the bank (perhaps in the Cayman Islands) or who can afford to pay regular health insurance premiums. A month long pause in the provision of basic, predicted health care will have devastating effects for the rest of time. It's not just a question of what happens in January: it's what happens to those waiting for these services in future months with an extra 8% of annual case load added to the queues. Obviously it will cause unnecessary misery, heart ache and pain but it will also gladen the hearts (if they have any) of all those in the business of encouraging people to jump towards private sector care. Sometimes the Tories tell the truth. Sometimes they lie. But they always work towards an agenda of serving the few at the cost of the many.
	Posted by Jonathan Brind.
INDEX
Wednesday January 3, 2018