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".

That'll be why Branson mostly lives abroad now

Privatisation already here then with branson? he's everywhere is he not oftenwrong.

Cameron’s hidden dementia taxes hit vulnerable hardest

• Older and disabled people will pay an average of £655 more for home help this year compared to four years ago.
• Dial-a-ride transport services double in price over same period.
• ‘Meals on wheels' cost 65p more - older people paying an extra £235 per year.

Many more details here:-
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disgusting is it not Ivan, I'm sitting here now with a pensioner who's monies are hard to stretch to live a normal life, and his bones are crumbling so he has steel implants almost everywhere.

Meanwhile, the weekend newspapers explain how someone saved themselves from paying £37million to the British taxman on a sale of Company shares, by the simple expedient of moving to Monaco.

But we're all in it together, aren't we?

Now that just makes me sick oftenwrong, how much bloody money has he got in total if that is just the damn tax?
But we would have seen no help from it if the bleeding taxman had got the £37million would we?

Phil the cure was stopped/caught some time ago I'm afraid, now what was his name again, oh yes Guy Fawkes.

This is what happened in the USA between 1970 and 2009. It’s what Cameron, as he privatises the NHS, is pushing for in the UK:-

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More than likely Ivan, and all nursing staff from agency too, so they will be private, as it was started under the thatcher government.

The great majority of Nurses (and associated vocations) in Britain's "Private" medical companies have been trained by the NHS.

When the Tories finally achieve their objective of privatisation, where will they get the staff in future?

Exactly oftenwrong, they will not have any will they, only the ones to hire from private companies. idiots.

One of the many promises which the Tories have broken was that they would keep child benefit universal. Few people complained when they scrapped the benefit if one parent is earning over £50,000 a year (but not if each parent is earning £45,000). Well that sounds fair enough, doesn’t it? Why do well-paid people need a handout to help bring up their children?

Maybe they don’t need it, but this was the first step in nibbling away at the principle of universality, it sets a precedent. In my opinion, it’s far better to pay all benefits to everyone who is entitled to them, since it’s easier to administer and less vulnerable to fraudulent claims. If it seems unfair that the rich are getting benefits they don’t need, claw them back by raising their top income tax rate to 60% or more.

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Attempts are being made to undermine a similar principle with regard to the NHS – namely that it should always be free at the point of delivery. As Pastor Niemoller might have said, first Jeremy Hunt came for foreigners, whose use of the NHS has been consuming 0.01% of its budget, but as most of us aren’t foreigners, few people took much notice. Now they want to charge alcohol abusers who clog up A&E departments at weekends, but as that doesn’t include most of us, few will be that bothered. That’s the insidious nature of all these suggestions – it seems perfectly reasonable not to give child benefits to the rich, not to treat sick foreigners who haven’t paid national insurance and to make drunks pay for their treatment. However, these examples are the thin end of the wedge and erode the undermining principles of our welfare state.

None of it has been thought through, but then that’s been a regular feature of Tory policies. Would anyone seriously suggest that a sick or injured foreigner should be left in the street, possibly to die? What if that foreigner has something contagious like the Ebola virus, is it really a good idea to refuse to admit them to a hospital? If someone is drunk, is it always their fault, what if their drinks were spiked? And if we’re going to make people pay for treatment if their condition is considered to be self-inflicted, who next? Smokers? The obese? Drug users? Sunbathers who develop melanoma? Those injured in road accidents which are deemed to be their fault? People injured playing sport or running? And how about pregnancy – that’s usually a self-inflicted condition, isn’t it?

There is another reason why any such charges would be unfair. Drinkers, smokers and motorists pay more tax than those who don’t imbibe, inhale or drive cars, so they are contributing to the system upon which they might need to call. But fairness has never been high on the Tories' agenda (if it’s been on it at all). Their concern is to abolish the welfare state and privatise the whole of the NHS, and if they can do it by stealth by curtailing the entitlements of convenient scapegoats like foreigners and drunks, they will be well satisfied. The NHS is not and never will be safe in Tory hands, but then we've all known that for a long time, haven't we?

You know my thoughts on the tory party already Ivan, and I'm sure the other posters do too.
I am sick to the back teeth of them, and because of the fact that I am on invalidity benefit, I get checked on all the bloody time even though the left side of my brain is scarred and getting worse.
Also have to take 16 tablets per day for my illnesses.

NHS faces huge bill over private provider’s botched eye operations.

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Ok - so we now need Ed to hammer this home to a complacent British public.

Hello? Hello...?

Not all of us are complacent Phil

I especially hope that Ed isn't.

 All that's missing is the evidence...

Lets hope we get it immediately then!!

I realise that I am very hard to please.

Call me old-fashioned, but I do love the prospect of an Opposition actually opposing -  and there is precious little evidence that Milly ever alights upon even the juiciest of available issues with which to embarrass the government in the eyes of Joe Public.

I sometimes think that if Cameron were caught stealing from a brothel to fund a cocaine habit that it would still be some months before Ed got round to indulging in a bout of 'tut-tutting' and expressing some mild disapproval.

Disappointing just isn't the word...

Oh Phil, you are asking the almost impossible,   

All new GP contracts will be thrown open to private providers

From an article by Alex Matthews-King:-

All new GP contracts will be opened up to bids from the private sector by NHS England in a move that GP leaders have warned marks the ‘death-knell’ of traditional life-long general practice.

As a tide of practices face closure, managers have said that because of competition law they will not be replaced with GMS or PMS contracts, but with time-limited APMS contracts instead.

The move has taken GP leaders by surprise, with the GPC seeking urgent legal advice about the move. Some have warned it will lead to the privatisation of the NHS with surgeries replaced with ‘short-term, profit making ventures’.

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This is almost the death knell for the NHS, as this will go through as sure that eggs are eggs.
Cameron has had this planned for over two years now, he just needed confidence behind him from getting the other hospital plans passed.
Believe me it has not taken the GPs totally by surprise either.

Sow the wind and reap a whirlwind.

Comparison with Motor Insurance "No claims" discounts shows that Private Health Insurance, on the contrary, costs more as time passes. An average family of four might begin by paying a reasonable amount per month, but if all four begin to make claims, the annual premiums leap into the stratosphere.

Stay healthy!

Exactly oftenwrong.
As the family like the car, get older too the insurance would go up each year anyway, it's either stay healthy or die young folks.

I'm still trying to get my head around the assertion that you can save money on doing something (e.g. within the NHS) by farming that operation out to a profit-making third party.

With privatisation of essential services, what you get is less of the good stuff for a vastly inflated price - simple economics

On the money she gets folks she can afford it can she not?

I've been brainwashed by experts, but even I can spot the thin end of the wedge, Ms. Leslie. Why not just say, "What costs you nothing is devalued?" Well, because we do pay for the NHS through taxation, and we all know it.

PRECISELY OFTENWRONG.
Most of us like yourself know we pay for the nhs through taxation, but still vote these morons into power.

stuart torr wrote: ....but still vote these morons into power.

Well to be absolutely precise, it was the Liber-Democratic quislings that allowed the various disasters of the past four years to be perpetrated, and may they rot in Hell for it. Without prejudice, of course.

No objections from myself on that statement oftenwrong.

Great response to Charlotte Leslie’s remarks from Darren Jones, her Labour opponent in the marginal seat of Bristol NW:-

"Ms Leslie is one of those Tory MPs who consistently talk down the NHS. She blames the NHS and patients for its challenges yet never seems to remember the fact that she voted to support David Cameron’s top-down reorganisation of the health service that caused many of these problems in the first place.

Does she mention the multi-billion pound cost of a reorganisation her party said they wouldn’t do as being an issue? No.

Does she mention the fact that she voted through reforms to give GPs huge amounts of new administrative responsibilities with commissioning whilst reducing overall funding to GP surgeries as being an issue? No.

Does she mention that A&E pressures might be due to the fact that concerned patients can’t see their GP in time or because there are staffing issues in some A&E departments? No.

What about her vote to support the fragmentation of the health service by outsourcing to private companies, or the fact that she voted to keep the government risk assessment on the impact of private companies making a profit from patients secret from the public? No, of course not.

Anything about the thousands of nurses that have lost their jobs or the fact that GP surgeries such as St Martin’s in Bristol are closing down because there aren’t enough GPs? Not a thing."

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Just the sort of major issue upon which one might expect Milly to have been able to score a few points. Alas, not this time...       

Ms Leslie should be carrying a placard, announcing that it is the tories plan to totally privatise everything that moves, walks, talks, heats, lights, within every hospital and gps surgery as quick as they can whilst in power.
All this with the least amount of expense on staffing, in every department available.

Did anyone notice anything strange in the recent reports about GP's surgeries being inspected on performance?

First. Why are the inspections being described as 'Ofsted' style rather than Care Quality Commission, who inspect all the other care providers?

Second. Where will doctors come from to replace those who 'fail' the inspection?

There were hints that it could be whole surgeries which could close due 'Poor performance', could this point to replacing current surgeries with one provided by private health care companies? Will they then be given control of the budgets currently held by those surgeries?

Where are you Ed, in alerting Joe Public to the dangers of all this? 

 Do you imagine for one minute that Cameron - were he is opposition - would be so silent? Where is the leadership? Where is the inspiration?

If silence is golden, you are truly a King Midas of staggering proportions...

I'm afraid Phil that at the moment Cameron has no opposition, and that is the worst point in British politics for years, imagine another four years of conservative rule.   

".... imagine another four years of conservative rule."

They will steal our souls, and sell them back to us.

At twice your income oftenwrong!!!