The reform of the NHS is now before parliament but is attracting almost no attention in the media at present. That is wrong. In effect the privatisation of the NHS is on the agenda.
I draw attention to this tweet and the links in it:
*Breaking News* Turns out there's a reason the #NHSWhitePaper said “flexibility” 38 times. #HealthandCareBill will remove statutory duty to provide hospital services.
Professor @AllysonPollock's analysis can be downloaded here: https://t.co/9owQtxwAS8 pic.twitter.com/U89rV60iDx— Moosa (@DrMQureshi) July 13, 2021
What is planned is a two-tier system. There will be basic NHS provision, but beyond a very basic service it is entirely possible that insurance may be required to provide additional services.
People need to wake up to this issue: the government is hoping that this will progress under the radar, and it must not.
I will be returning to this issue, probably many times
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Having read the above I agree.
Don’t get me wrong – it’s disgusting but it is just seeming to ratify the way the service has been going for decades – we’ve already seen it in dentistry haven’t we and certain treatments on the NHS.
In a way at least they have come out and actually said it for once if you see what I mean.
And of course look at the timing – un-lockdown and this in the background. Expertly done I must say – the Neo-lib Tories definitely don’t ley good crises go to waste – self made ones too.
Labour should be all over this like a landslide. We hope.
This has just come to my attention –
Jeremy Corbyn
@jeremycorbyn
21h
The Secretary of State for Health has been in post for over two weeks. Neither
@DHSCgovuk
, JP Morgan or healthcare business C3ai which paid
@sajidjavid
to advise on ‘market opportunities’, have issued press releases confirming the dates he stood down. Has he fully cut his ties?
I read the book SOS NHS about the 2012 Health and Social Care Act.
Lots of medical people objected but were told by some of the medical organisations “we have lots of influence both in the Commons and the Lords, no need to worry”. In fact the act went through with little publicity (I don’t remember hearing much about its passage during the time).
If ever there was a time for the opposition parties to work together, this is it. Strangely, it might be the Lords who prove to be the main obstacle to the Bill.
An academic study suggested I was the fourth most active opponent of that Act on social media
I have fought and fought against the original Lansley bill, which Nick Clegg and Shirley Williams persuaded the wilfully blind LibDems to accept at the Sheffield conference. That was the death knell. I know Nick and we corresponded on the bill esp. Section 75. His SPAD persuaded him that because GPs were largely “private” anyway so the privatisation bit was not that significant.
Nick and Shirley stood in front of, I think, the Health offices and proclaimed that they would never permit privatisation – and have never acknowledged their hypocrisy. If the LibDems had refused to support the 2012 Bill Nick might have been PM today as the LibDems were on the up despite the student fees U-turn, and the world would be a different place.
Allyson Pollock has been the most cogent attacker of the Tory policies, but still failed. We cannot allow this to continue. There has to be a way. I thought that if we showed how economically unsound the Tory policy was we could make headway; but the activists are stuck in their morbidity paradigm not realising that the Tories don’t give a damn about the sick, the disabled, the poor or the elderly.
Suggestions please
It looks like the Tories want to edge towards a means-tested over a bureaucratized system like France before going for the full-blown disastrous private profit-only US system.
Someone commented that the NHS will turn into a US style system, where you must pay or have insurance. I agree the idea is probably two tier, like the US system, which has Medicare, much worse health provision for the poorest. Those on medium income without insurance are the ones going bankrupt.
The beloved worshipped and lusty MSM news Ken & Barbies haven’t told a straight truth at the time it is known and have followed a propaganda campaign on their lead stories daily. Slyly sneaking some truth in, that preserves their blushes and reinforces the stereotypes of themselves within the media landscape:
The story of the privatisation of the NHS in the Guardian today is offset with another story about how Labour is not trusted with spending – as that dismal rag carries on with their ancient masters fairytale of Taxpayers Money, Public debt and inflation and interest rates. Leaving just a couple of sop stories of how Europeans are shocked by the British maddening crowds I.e celebrating that the U.K. is not in the EU anymore – who does that play to? You can guess. The second sop that goes with that is the million signatories already on a petition to bar racist fans for life from attending matches.
‘ Yup lookey here the guardianistas are still whining about BrexShit and wanting to takeaway your cultural ancient right to support who you like and be a king in your own home as real Labour only wants to bankrupt you by giving free medical treatments to foreigners because they think there is a magic money tree and can never be trusted with the nations finances! ‘
It impacts Scotland also. The block grant for Scotland is affected by the spending on the NHS in England. The redoubtable Allysson Pollock has been reporting on it for some time. Because the priority in PFI contracts is to meet debt obligations, NHS hospitals in England have been closing wards and the provision of services.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/jun/29/pfi-crippling-nhs
It also opens the door for such as Ian Paterson, jailed breast surgeon, who operated within the NHS and privately.
https://weownit.org.uk/blog/did-private-hospital-companies-make-millions-pounds-out-harm-caused-750-women
“Because whilst Paterson also harmed patients within NHS hospitals, he was convicted and sent to prison for his treatment of patients in private hospitals.
And whilst questions remain about his exact motivations, it is without doubt that he will have made substantial amounts of money from his crimes.
So, for every patient that he told had cancer when they didn’t and then operated on them unnecessarily – sometimes removing their breasts – he received a fee for his services either from the patients themselves or from their health insurer.”
State patients may be sidelined in order to allow private patients to be treated.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/nhs-privatisation-health-service-exposed-private-cancer-patients-hospitals-treatment-work-government-foi-a7974096.html
Research shows that the privatisation of cleaning services resulted in lower quality of performance with more hospital acquired infection.Newspapers report the sighting of rats in maternity wards and operating theatres and infestations of cockroaches.
We already have a long-standing system where we get a certain level of health care (under-)funded by NI and Income tax and if we want anything more or better we have to pay into private health Insurance. How will the new reforms make for a different experience from this for the average person?
You clearly are somewhere else to me
That’s not how healthcare works in the UK
I think that the low level of replies indicates the main problem, i.e. people think the NHS is OK because it is working – just like the car running on the last centilitre of fuel. We need to wake them up.
You say that’s not how health care works in the UK.
Two years ago my 53 year old husband got prostate cancer. He was offered surgery with no nerve sparing (leaving him incontinent and impotent for life) and a massive amount of RT to his pelvic area, which, because of his age, put him at a much higher risk of further cancers ten years down the line. Apart from hormone treatment, nothing else was on offer.
After looking down every possible avenue, we discovered there was another option for his stage of cancer. This option would likely save all the nerves and require no RT. This option had been trialed by cancer research and paid for out of public donations in 2012 and had very positive outcomes. It was licensed to the private sector and not the NHS.
Similarly, I’ve been diagnosed with a rare lymphoma and the drug/chemo known to do wonders for this cancer can not be used by the NHS until you have first failed two other grueling treatments. If I were anywhere else within Europe, including Romania, I would be given this treatment. If I had private medicine, it would be my first line of treatment.
The NHS has been radically cutting back on best treatment options for some years now.
I believe I have just gone through one of the precursor mechanisms to enable privatisation. My local health authority Somerset NHS Foundation Trust have entered into an SRA (Sponsored Research Agreement) with SenSyne. SenSyne is tech company run by Labour peer Lord Drayson. The agreement will take private patient data, ‘anonymise’ it and provide it on demand to SenSyne. The Trust tell me that SRA’s fall outside the regulations on private medical data confidentiality and they are under no obligation to respect the opt out. They say the moneys received will be put towards improving research facilities. They have been given a shareholding at SenSyne.
The Trust have now (reluctantly) accepted the validity of Type1 opt outs but as I found out it is made bloody difficult to find and complete the form. A study of NHS Digital Register found hundreds of organisations, private and public, have ignored the opt outs. This represents a treasure trove for the American Health Industry and a massive bargaining chip for Bojo in his attempts to reach a trade deal. Given his assurances regarding Northern Ireland in the Brexit talks you will perhaps forgive a level of cynicism regarding his abilities to negotiate in our interests.
Why was I so exercised over ‘anoymised’ data? Perhaps it is because I read research from Imperial College London and Belgium’s Université Catholique de Louvain published research showing that current anonymising techniques are unable to provide security in large datasets .
“Our results suggest that even heavily sampled anonymized datasets are unlikely to satisfy the modern standards for anonymization set forth by GDPR [Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation] and seriously challenge the technical and legal adequacy of the de-identification release-and-forget model,”
Perhaps it is because Hancock has already sold 60 million records to the US. Mostly it is because using the data the Trust say they collect and publicly available demographics even I was able to reduce re-identity candidates for my area from 19,736 to 51 possibles. And I do not have access to a Cray computer, machine learning or restricted access datasets. I do not feel safe. I do not feel the NHS is safe.
https://www.theysolditanyway.com/
https://www.imperial.ac.uk/media/imperial-college/data-science-institute/WhitePaper_SolvingALPrivacyIssues.pdf
Thanks