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".

At twice your income oftenwrong!!!

They would that oftenwrong, bet the interest rate would be high though.  

Is the NHS safe in Tory hands?

You may as well ask : " Should I let my two year-old play with a rattlesnake..?"

Yep Phil but you don't get many of those slithering loose down my way, the live electric wires are about the same I reckon.

How safe are you in a Private Hospital?

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Yet he is only going to serve half his sentence oftenwrong.  

Many people think that such occurrences should be the corporate responsibility of the hospital's management, not just an individual chosen to be scapegoat.

They could be right in one sense oftenwrong, but it wasn't all of them that delayed the operation was it ?
The whole ward and theatre could be held responsible for the total care given maybe?

As is so often the case, the bare press reports omit details which go a long way towards understanding the circumstances. A full description was printed in a recent Sunday Times Magazine - "David Sellu was a respected surgeon. Now he’s in prison, blamed for the death of a seriously ill patient. His case sets an alarming precedent. Will doctors shy away from risky operations? Margarette Driscoll reports.."

Times newspapers content on the internet is behind a pay-wall, so I haven't shown a link, but the full tale (if you can find a copy) shows how potentially dangerous private medicine can be in comparison with the fuller resources provided by the NHS, up to now.

oftenwrong, if what you are actually saying is at a properly staffed NHS hospital, the risks of something like this happening are greatly reduced compared to private medicine?
Then boy am I in total agreement.

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" So, like the Coalition, he doesn't have a leg to stand on..."

Daily Mail, biggest propaganda machine the Tories have, and you have to pay for the damn thing!!

Trafalgar Square today: the conclusion of the Jarrow March for the NHS. Will it get reported by the BBC, or will the corporation continue its virtual news blackout of any stories to do with the privatisation by stealth of the NHS and any opposition to it?

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Covered by The Daily Wail, if that counts ....

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I thank all the people of Jarrow who marched not only today, but on every march that they do.
The town of Jarrow are synonymous for their marches, and for standing up against the Tory government for years.
Is this since their ship building yards were closed down Ivan?
If I had known it was going on I would have joined them just to meet the people from Jarrow and shake their hands.

I don't think the bbc can keep off from mentioning it bobby.

There was no mention of the conclusion of this march on the 6pm news on Radio 4 tonight.

BBC News is very subtle with its bias. It doesn't express overt support for the Tories in the way that tabloid trash newspapers do, it does it by omitting some stories altogether. You might say "if it's left, it's left out". I'm sure that with the virtual blackout by the BBC of the tortuous passage through Parliament of the Health and Social Care Act of 2012, most people still don't realise that the NHS is being taken from them piece by piece. No doubt the NHS logo will remain in place everywhere for as long as it suits.

Ban Biased Channel, Should be until it gives all the news equally.

Sorry oftenwrong I missed joining them in Nottingham and going to London with them, I should watch the news more often I'm afraid.

There does seem to be rather a lot of "News" at the moment. Not easy to keep up with it all, Stuart.

So true oftenwrong, so very true.

Still More News

British MEPs have been lobbied to vote against the proposed free-trade agreement between the EU and US over fears of NHS privatisation.

As the UK's biggest trade unions prepare to debate motions that oppose the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) at the Trade Union Congress in Liverpool on Wednesday 10 September, Len McCluskey, the general secretary of Britain's largest union Unite, has written to each UK MEP appealing for them to veto the treaty in the European Parliament.

Last week, IBTimes UK reported that Lord Livingston, the Trade Minister, would not be using a veto option to exempt public service from the wide-reaching agreement, fuelling fears that the UK will be left open to legal action from third-party companies should national health regulations impede on their profits.

Briefing journalists at Westminster, Livingston said: "The idea that this will lead to privatisation of the NHS is not true," adding that individual procurement groups will make decisions over whether to use US healthcare providers and that should TTIP come into effect, "the NHS will still look like it does today".

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It will be privatised in the future OW, no matter what because as soon as the tories get back in even if it's the next election, it will get privatised.

Exactly bobby.
That is why I'm getting almost totally deaf in my right ear and pretty deaf in my left, GPs again asap, and get him to refer me again.

Too much time spent in Discos during a mis-spent youth, Stuart?

That and fighting at school got my right eardrum perforated OW.

The words of Harry Smith at the Labour Party Conference 24th Sept 2014, 8 months before the next General Election.
I came into this world in the rough and ready year of 1923. I am from Barnsley and I can tell you that my childhood, like so many others from that era, was not an episode from Downton Abbey.

Instead, it was a barbarous time. It was a bleak time. It was an uncivilized time because public healthcare didn't exist.

Back then hospitals, doctors and medicine were for the privileged few because they were run for profit rather than as a vital state service that keeps a nation's citizens fit and healthy.

My memories stretch back almost a hundred years, and if I close my eyes, I can smell the poverty that oozed from the dusky tenement streets of my boyhood.

I can taste on my lips the bread and drippings I was served for my tea. I can remember extreme hunger, and my parent's undying love for me. I can still feel my mum and dad's desperation as they tried to keep our family safe and healthy in the slum we called home.

Poor mum and dad. No matter how hard they tried to protect me and my sisters, the cards were stacked against them because common diseases trolled our neighbourhoods and snuffed out life like a cold breath on a warm candle flame.

I still remember hearing while I played as a child on my street the anguished cries that floated from a window on my boyhood street. They were the screams from a woman dying from cancer who couldn't afford morphine to ease her passage from this life.

No one in our community was safe from poor health, sickness and disease. In our home, TB came for my oldest sister, Marion, who was the apple of my dad's eye. Her sickness and his inability to pay for medicine broke his heart.

Tuberculosis tortured my sister and left her an invalid that had to be restrained with ropes tied to her bed. My parents did everything in their power to keep Marion alive and comfortable but they just didn't have the dosh to get her to the best clinics, doctors or medicines.

Instead she wasted away before our eyes until my mother could no longer handle her care and she was dispatched to our workhouse infirmary where she died 87 years ago. Mum and dad couldn't afford to bury their darling daughter. So like the rest of our country's indigent, she was dumped nameless into a pauper's pit.

My family's story isn't unique. Rampant poverty and no health care were the norm for the Britain of my youth. That injustice galvanized my generation to become, after the Second World War, the tide that raised all boats.

In 1945, at the age of 22, still in the RAF after a long hard Great Depression and a savage and brutal war, I voted for the first time.

Election Day 1945 was one of the proudest days in my life. I felt that I was finally getting a chance to grab destiny by the shirt collar and that is why I voted for Labour and for the creation of the NHS.


Harry Smith's NHS Story

Today my heart is with all of those people from my generation who didn't make it past childhood, didn't get an education, didn't grow as individuals, didn't marry, didn't raise a family and didn't enjoy the fruits of retirement. They died needlessly and too early. But my heart is also with the people of the present, who are struggling once more to make ends meet, and whose futures I fear for.

Today, we must be vigilant. We must be vocal. We must demand that the NHS will always remain an institution for the people and by the people.

We must never ever let the NHS free from our grasp because if we do your future will be my past. So I want to say loudly and clearly: Mr Cameron, keep your mitts off my NHS."


Harry Smith's NHS Story


Harry Leslie Smith

Please read this, digest it as its what is awaiting many if the Tories get their hands on our NHS for long enough to implement. Show it to your friends and neighbours.

bobby.
A very moving story my friend, reminding me so much of my grandfathers days, he also lived near Barnsley, in a mining village called south elmsall, I too had the bread and dripping sandwiches as a child.

I'm proud to be a member of the same party as Harry, and I'm honoured that he and I have been following each other on Twitter for some time. If you want to watch that speech:-


Source: YouTube

Wish guys like that could live forever folks, as that is real men.

stuart torr said. Wish guys like that could live forever folks, as that is real men.

If we rid ourselves of this Toxic Coalition Government and don't let UKIP anywhere near the reigns of power, people will certainly live longer.

So very true bobby, and maybe a couple more like it around Britain on their election campaign.
They really do need things like that to get the people thinking about what the tories will do to our NHS DO THEY NOT?

Louise Bagshawe won the marginal seat of Corby for the Tories in the 2010 election, and she soon became one of Rupert Murdoch’s leading apologists in Parliament. That may be at least partly because her sister, Tilly Bagshawe, gets her work published by Harper Collins, which is owned by Murdoch.

In 2011, Louise Bagshawe married her much older American music manager husband, Peter Mensch, and in the following year decided to quit Parliament (handing Labour an easy by-election victory) and move to New York with her three children from her first marriage. One might have hoped that she would then shut up about UK politics and go away, but in what seems like attention-seeking behaviour, she frequently pops up on Twitter with some stupid or outrageous remark. Her latest offering is perhaps the sickest of all: she dismissed Harry Leslie Smith’s poignant speech about the NHS at the Labour conference as “crap”. The vile woman isn’t fit to lace his boots.

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Nice one Ivan, and so very true.

Signs of desperation are cropping up all over the Tory ranks.

100,000 "special homes" to be built. (It sez 'ere)

Another defection of a Tory MP to UKIP (yawn)

Instant shrill ripostes to any and all Labour proposals. Quelle surprise.

Just means UKIP 3RD largest party in UK very soon if not already ahead of the liberals, soon be UKIP/TORY PARTY?
Special homes for retired tories?

Well there you have it....this Tory government has finally angered Midwives......

Midwives to strike after Jeremy Hunt scraps 1% pay rise
Industrial action together with other NHS staff is first in Royal College of Midwives’ 133-year history

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Midwives will go on strike for the first time as part of concerted industrial action by NHS staff over the government’s rejection of a recommended 1% pay rise.

They will walk out for four hours between 7am and 11am on 13 October alongside members of other unions representing NHS staff.

The Royal College of Midwives (RCM) is staging the first walkout in its 133-year history after members in England voted by a margin of more than four to one to strike.

On a 49.4% turnout 82.2% said they were prepared to take part in a strike, with just 17.8% against. “This is a resounding yes from our members. It could not send a clearer signal about the level of discontent on this issue to those denying them a very modest 1% pay increase,” said the RCM chief executive, Cathy Warwick.