It's now certain the Tories have got it in for the NHS. As the FT reports today:
Cabinet ministers will on Tuesday mount a collective attack on the “ringfence” protecting the NHS from budget cuts, as the search for £11.5bn of election year savings reaches a critical stage.
So much for this:
So far they've increased the debt, hardly cut the deficit, which is vastly higher than all bar one year under Labour, and are now cutting the NHS.
Some promise.
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Doubt whether they’ll do this before 2015 but let’s face it, Labour have made it rather easy for them to do so by arguing that there should be no ringfence in the first place.
Charges for visiting your GP. – bet you.
Could the Tories be that stupid? This will only happen the other side of a General Election which the Tories win, because even a brain-dead Sun-reader would work out that something was wrong if it cost them to see their GP.
No, it will be much more stealthy than that: we’ll wake up and discover that the NHS, like the municipal bus system, having been subjected to the “magic of the market” and “competition”, will actually be in the hands of four or five big providers, who will form a cartel to fix prices,whatever the theory of market efficiency says.
Adam Smith had them sussed more than 200 years ago, in “The Wealth of Nations”, and I quote:
“People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices. It is impossible indeed to prevent such meetings, by any law which either could be executed, or would be consistent with liberty and justice. But though the law cannot hinder people of the same trade from sometimes assembling together, it ought to do nothing to facilitate such assemblies; much less to render them necessary.”
We’re sleepwalking into a disaster, and the Tories DID lie about their intentions, knowing they could never win an Election if people knew they intended to dismember the NHS. They really are Nye Bevan’s “lower than vermin”.
As ever, I agree
Cameron says that to save a measly £20m he will introduce NHS charges for immigrants. This means two things. Firstly, everyone will have to give proof of their entitlement to NHS care before they get that care: a national ID system. Everyone has an NHS number, but few people know what theirs is, nor are they ever asked for it. That will change. Secondly, Cameron says that immigrants will have to have insurance to cover emergency treatment (even in the US you do not have to have insurance for emergency treatment). In the UK we only have gold card medical insurance – insurance for elective treatment in private hospitals where the accommodation is 5 star hotel equivalent. We we do not have insurance that will cover people with chronic conditions, or treatment for emergency care.
So Cameron’s announcement that immigrants will have to pay for NHS treatment is significant because it will mean that the insurance companies will develop products for people with chronic conditions and for emergency care. In other words EXACTLY the sort of products that will be needed when a future Conservative (or LIB Dem) government moves us to an insurance funded system.
And yet there is more. Cameron has decreed that in 2014 people with long term conditions will have personal healthcare budgets. That’s right, people will be told how much money they are allowed to spend on treating their condition, and patients – not GPs – will have to procure that treatment. Two thirds of the NHS budget is spent on people with long term conditions, so this policy change is huge – anyone hear about it? Personal budgets have already been introduced in social care (the last government brought them in) and the result is that people with personal budgets are underfunded and subject to the local authority cuts. The result is that either people go without the care they need, or they have to pay top ups even to get basic care. Top-ups. The same will happen in the NHS with personal healthcare budgets. They will lead to people paying top-ups to get basic NHS care, and people with long term conditions, worried about this, will look to the insurance companies for some solution.
In 2005, in an article for the Independent that has now disappeared off the internet, Nick Clegg said that he wanted the NHS to be “broken up” and for the introduction of insurance. He’s only a few years off getting his dream.