Is the NHS really safe in Tory hands?

First topic message reminder :

Here is a news item from North Yorkshire which never made it onto the national headlines

A York-based practice has written to its patients offering them a range of minor treatments privately, claiming they are not funded by the local NHS.

Doctors' leaders said this could be the start of a worrying trend due to the squeeze on finances and NHS overhaul.

The letter, seen by the BBC, said local health chiefs had stopped funding a range of services, but added they could still have them done privately at a number of clinics, including one owned by the practice.

These included removing skin tags from £56.30 to treating benign tumours for £243.20.

Dr Richard Vautrey, of the British Medical Association, added: "The dire finances of many trusts means that many more NHS treatments are likely to become unavailable in the future".

10 ways the Tories have ruined our NHS
 
- Public satisfaction with NHS at 'record low' (June 2012).
 
- 20,000 NHS staff axed.
 
- 11,000 beds axed.
 
- A&E waiting times at 8-year high.
 
- NHS spending promise broken.
 
- Record high clinical negligence payouts.
 
- 22 treatments now restricted.
 
- £7 billion of NHS privatised.
 
- 30% of NHS walk-in centres shut
 
- Ignored tribunal ruling to publish risk register.
 
Full details here:-
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A pessimist might imagine that the Government almost WANTED the NHS to fail.

The NHS as is, is bound to fail. People live longer, 95% of people use the NHS mostly in their last 10 years, the country has too many non taxpayers.

oftenwrong wrote:A pessimist might imagine that the Government almost WANTED the NHS to fail.

no, really? Do you think so?

Just a stab in the dark, boatlady.

We must have been very naughty to get such a hostile government.

Privatised NHS blood service sold to Mitt Romney company

Friday, 19 July 2013 7:53 AM By Ian Dunt  
 
"Plasma Resources UK, which provides blood supplies to the NHS, has been sold to Bain Capital, a private equity firm set up by Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney.
 
The move, which has angered some medical experts, is being described as a 'privatisation too far' in some circles.
 
"It's hard to conceive of a worse outcome for a sale of this particularly sensitive national health asset than a private equity company with none of the safeguards in terms of governance of a publicly quoted company and being answerable to shareholders," said crossbench peer Lord Owen, who helped made the UK self-sufficient in blood supplies when he was Labour health minister in the 1970s."
 
There we have it, Privatisation is now definitely a thing of the present and not just the future.
 
I am diabetic and need to have my retina's photographed yearly, I have just received my appointment letter, and instead of the clinic being an NHS clinic, the appointment has come from Virgin Care. NHS privatisation is well and truly with us. I haven't heard a thing about it from the Labour opposition, it seems that Lord Owen (lib dem x social Democrat x Labour) is the only voice on the matter. Wake up Labour and when you see an open goal, take an effing shot.

Ivan, I originally posted the above on the politics board as I honestly think it is more to do with Tory political ideology than health.

bobby. It's further proof that the NHS is being privatised and is definitely not safe in Tory hands, rather than evidence of Cameron being a moron from outside the universe.
 
You beat me to it on the subject of blood plasma being sold to Mitt Romney! I was about to post this article by Polly Toynbee:-
 
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tlttf wrote:  The NHS as is, is bound to fail. People live longer, 95% of people use the NHS mostly in their last 10 years, the country has too many non taxpayers.
 
Hello Landy, yes the NHS or what's left of it will fail as is designed to by the Tories. So wouldn't it be better for the country, if the Government instead of giving themselves and the others on the top table a nice tax drop, shed loads of cheap shares directly from the privatisations and a supply of cheap labour, to introduce some policies that will grow our economy as it was growing when they stole power in may 2010. Give people work a decent wage and aspirations then there would be no reason not to raise the national insurance contribution to whatever is needed. Even as the Bastard Cameron was saying "The NHS is safe in our hands" we all knew the evil shit was lying. The NHS certainly needs some reforming but what they are doing without a mandate is nothing short of criminal
The reason that we do not have the NHS that we need is that it is always used as a political football, your lot come in and create failure in order to privatise and line their own pockets, then my lot come in and have to use up precious time and money in an attempt to rectify the damage done by the Tories and on and on, the same can be said of education. The thing is, what they now have is a golden opportunity for Tory ideology to be forced on us, that is the Banking crisis, without that they wouldn’t have any excuses for the ridiculous austerity they are forcing people into. Also without the banking crisis the Tories wouldn’t have been able to blame Gordon Brown for the Global Credit Crunch and now would not be in power.

In the UK, donating blood has always been voluntary, corresponding to a civic duty. The only cost to the NHS has been the administration and incidental operational costs.

Contrast that with the USA and many other countries, in which (e.g. students or the unemployed) can raise emergency cash by donating their blood to a Collecting Agency, which makes supplies available to Hospitals on a commercial profit-making basis. Tory Heaven!

I'm a little confused about this - the blood plasma service has been sold off - anyone know how that relates to the blood donor service?
My other half has been told it's a whole other thing and shouldn't affect his decision about whether or not to donate.
 
I will be looking into it myself, but if anyone has a quick answer, I'd be appreciative.

In a sense, the Tories have shot the fox. Their original intention was to cast-off government responsibility for the NHS in any shape or form.
Any complaints? Nuffink to do with me, Guv!!
Cue coalition partner: Oh! No, you don't! Governments are responsible for public health, live with it!
So all the bright ideas for letting Tory Chums cream off NHS assets remain subject to parliamentary oversight.
Which is why Jeremy *unt is suddenly taking a personal interest in Hospital conditions. He finds himself still responsible.

Not at all according to plan.

Selling our safety to the highest bidder: the privatisation of Plasma Resources UK
 
Extracts from an article by Lucy Reynolds, research fellow at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine:-
 
"Plasma is the watery fluid in blood, in which the red and white cells move. The open market in plasma products creates incentives to exploit all sources of plasma, to operate lax donor selection standards and cut corners on infection control. This allows patients to be infected with lethal diseases.

Competition law was first used by profit-making blood harvesters to force risky blood on US hospitals in 1956. Nowadays the stakes are even higher, with more fatal blood-borne infections in the blood supply and new diseases emerging every few years. Following the generation of the disease vCJD, through reduced UK regulation of cattle feed processing which transmitted a brain disease of sheep to cows from where it proved transmissible to humans, it was no longer safe to make plasma products from UK donors. So in 2002 the government purchased a US plasma source to be a protected supply for UK patients. This government has now privatised this supply, leaving the country to rely wholly on the open market for supplies.

A boom in new immune-based treatments is putting huge stress on world supplies of plasma, given that most countries make plasma buying illegal. This will result in more and more marginal sources of plasma supply coming into the plasma products market. By selling Plasma Resources UK, our government commits us to buying all plasma products for UK patients from market suppliers who almost all have a track record of avoidable quality problems, in many cases resulting in deaths or serious chronic illness such as HIV."
 
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Tory ideology can damage your health.

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nicely argued piece here from our own SKWalker

NHS reprieved !!

Three guilty nurses struck-off.

All problems resolved.

Rejoice.

£25 to see your GP: Majority of doctors want to charge patients for routine appointments
Doctors say that patient demand has become unmanageable

The ideal of an NHS free at the point of need was dealt a serious blow today, as a survey of family doctors revealed unprecedented levels of support for charging patients for routine appointments.

For the first time in recent memory, more than half of GPs believe patients should pay fees to see their doctor. The majority of those in favour said that charges should be between £5 and £25 per appointment.

Doctors say that patient demand has become unmanageable and warn that changes to GP contracts have heaped more work on them without increasing their funding. But patients said that GPs were threatening the “founding principles” of the NHS.

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Now who was it Dave said about giving control of the NHS budget to?

Was it because they, the GP's, knew better what patients needed?

The tsunami of Tory propaganda, propogated by a Right-wing Press dissecting the fundamentals of Public Health provision, was intended to produce a groundswell of agreement.

Anything else would have been perverse.

Some GP's nevertheless, the apolitical ones, will readily comprehend who actually butters their bread.

It is a fact that some people visit their doctors inappropriately, to talk about issues that strictly speaking have little to do with their health, but maybe more to do with their social and economic situation.
I'd have thought the solution to that problem might be to take steps to improve people's social and economic situation.
 
People who live in sub standard accommodation have more illnesses.
People who can't afford to feed themselves properly have more illnesses
People who are worried sick about their future, who are in unmanageable debt and don't have secure employment have more illnesses
People who face having their benefit income withdrawn for any or no reason get stressed and have more illnesses.
 
Maybe the solution would be to help people achieve acceptable standards of living?

It's been a long time since the topic question has been without an inescapable answer. Britain is governed by liars. Though not of course for the first time.

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If any clearer demonstration of the reasons behind the government’s and media’s strategy of escalating, negative NHS coverage was needed, it has been provided by a particularly shameless private health insurance website.

So sure of themselves are private health providers under this deeply, instinctively and intentionally anti-NHS government that this site doesn’t even attempt to be subtle. Instead it brazenly plays on the fear created by the barrage of skewed NHS smear stories to attempt to harvest cash from gullible or ill-informed people:

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In a tactic that would be laughable if it weren’t so cynical and sinister, the site attempts to scare people into paying out unknown-but-no-doubt-hefty sums to buy private health insurance under its scandalous heading:

If you thought the NHS was enough to protect your health, then you might think twice after reading these 3 shocking true accounts! Ensure your health is protected today

It then goes on to list its three ‘horror stories’, before preparing for its sales pitch with this little gem:

An astonishing 16,000 complaints were made about the NHS in 2012-13 alone, illustrating that the core ‘care’ principle of nursing seems to be disappearing rapidly from its practice. NHS nurses even claimed the new generation of university-trained nurses felt basic care tasks, such as bathing their patients, were ‘beneath them’

Not content with smearing the NHS, it also has to smear nurses as uncaring and arrogant – but only NHS nurses, of course. Then its doctors’ turn:

If you were to fall ill, it’s only natural that you would want to be treated and cared for to a high standard: Private facilities have strong reputations to uphold and less time pressures, meaning consultants can dedicate more attention to individual patients.

An astonishingly misleading statement, since private health companies have paid millions into the funds of the Tories who are creating the time pressures. Not to mention the fact that a private health facility was recently bought back by public funds because of documented avoidable deaths – a fact conveniently ignored by the anti-NHS press and the government.

Since private facilities have so much more time, and their reputations to consider, you have to wonder what their excuse was for these ‘needless deaths’ (to borrow one of the Daily Mail’s favourite anti-NHS catchphrase).

And the bad grammar – ‘less time pressures’ – shows how cavalier these people are. They have such contempt for their dupes that they can’t even be bothered to pay a proper copywriter to create their text. This contempt – and deliberate twisting of facts – echoes perfectly the media line that private health has orchestrated just as it has with the Tories. The reality is that the mortality rate in the NHS fell consistently for years under the last Labour government, as Bruce Keogh pointed out in his recent report into supposedly-failing hospitals:

It is important to understand that mortality in all NHS hospitals has been falling over the last decade: overall mortality has fallen by about 30% and the improvement is even greater when the increasing complexity of patients being treated is taken into account.

Or as this graph by the Nuffield Trust shows even more clearly:

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The ‘astonishing 16,000 complaints’ last year sounds like a huge figure. But the NHS treats 1 million patients every 36 hours – which equates to around 243 million treatments a year. Those 16,000 complaints mean a rate of..

0.006%

It’s astonishing alright. Astonishingly low.

Compare that with the ‘big 6′ energy companies’ complaint rate of 100,000 a week, and you start to see that the NHS is actually pretty freaking awesome.

You won’t find any of this on the private health site, of course. Nor will you find it in most of the media. What you will find is a blatant, brazen attempt to exploit deliberately-constructed falsehoods in order to bilk even more money out of the ignorant – and such hubris that subtlety is not even attempted.

So blatant, so brazen, that you could say they ‘Telegraphed’ it.

Did anyone else notice - the man in the picture looks a lot like Michael Gove?

Astonished this advertising is allowed (no, actually I'm not - but in a decent country it wouldn't be) - isn't there a rule about not actually slagging off your competitors?

The freedom to make money at the expense of others might seem to be fairly safe.

I often wonder what is the exact antonym of 'charitable'.

Answers on a postcard, please

How do you spell Tory?  

d*ckhead

SKW Wrote "In a tactic that would be laughable if it weren’t so cynical and sinister, the site attempts to scare people into paying out unknown-but-no-doubt-hefty sums to buy private health insurance under its scandalous heading:"

"So sure of themselves are private health providers under this deeply, instinctively and intentionally anti-NHS government that this site doesn’t even attempt to be subtle. Instead it brazenly plays on the fear created by the barrage of skewed NHS smear stories to attempt to harvest cash from gullible or ill-informed people:"

How so very plain it is to see what this Tory led so called government are up to.

Will the fickle electorate see through it all? I hope so but doubt it.

Private Health is not sufficiently understood. The advertising leads people to think that perfect health results from writing a cheque, but what sane person could believe that? All you buy is cossetting, and if that's what people choose to do with their money there is a plenitude of 5* hotels offering a similar service.

The medical staff almost all work also in the NHS, so the only other thing on offer is queue-jumping. Not easy if we're all in it together.

An elderly lady retired GP who lived a few houses from me, swore by BUPA. She fell ill and was rushed to the local private hospital where she died because they did not have the equipment that the DGH had on board only a mile away.
Another elderly lady had an operation paid for by BUPA. The problem returned two yrs later and BUPA refused to pay for the operation twice, (inthe small print). She paid for the operation herself and continued to pay an yearly £3000 by direct debit. She died on the 14th of November 94, the payment for the following year was taken by direct debit on the 12th November two days earlier. Her relatives requsted a re-fund and it was refused (small print again).
Anyone fancy buying private health care?  

The Health Providers are essentially the same firms you would go to for car insurance or a home contents policy. Does anyone expect sympathy and compassion to be a part of such transactions?

 "Does anyone expect sympathy and compassion to be a part of such transactions?."

Not a chance in hell Often right.

How much lower can this government sink?
 
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Good piece - i do think this latest wheeze of Jeremy *unt is the absolute pits.
It will result in experienced staff leaving the NHS in their droves to work in private hospitals, where they can - leaving trainees and less skilled staff to hodld the fort in the NHS establishments - maybe that's the plan?

There is now a private company providing a computer service to GPs surgeries that records prescriptions and dosage. Patients can use the internet to re-order where appropriate.

The data collected must be of considerable interest to other Health Professionals.

Nothing surprises me with these tyrants. They care not for anything nor anybody except of course themselves, their rich friends and the utimate PROFIT at any cost. They will from now on steamroll more and more unpopular policies in the knowledge that they will not be returned to power next time.

In addition they are mounting a scorched earth policy to make life hell for the incoming Labour Party.

Hi Mel your last post on the 8th just about says it all, especially the "PROFIT" PART as that is what any tory government aims for from day one of being elected. Alas I am afraid this has also become one of the aims of the labour party too, so now we do not have much choice when it comes to putting your x in the little box do we, it is simply a lesser of two evils.

Hello stu,
Welcome aboard.

Profit? yes that is aTory God. However, with the greatest of respect I think you have fallen into the trap that many people have. This thinking that there is "not much choice when it comes to voting" is derived from the press/media and most of all from folk who do not fully understand, nor bother to look into politics and therefore spread a false picture of situation.

How anyone could for one moment think that any other party than the Tories could treat the disabled, the poor, the homeless, the unemployed, the youth, the students, the NHS staff and a thousand other cruel policies in such a way, is utterly rediculous IMO.
On top of all that look at what effect privatisation via the Tories has done to the majority of people in this country. The rich shareholders are being allowed by the Tories to absolutely RIP US OFF stu.
Question---- Are you feelling better off than you did 5yrs ago?
I say stu that if people think that all parties are the same, then it will be their fault if we get yet another dose of these cruel Tory tyrants and they will deserve what they get.
This reminds me of the fools who said before the last election "it's time for a change" and look where that has got us.