And It Should Scandalise Us

Owen Jones writes:

Wanted: somebody who can explain why this story is not being reported as a national scandal.

There are English GP practices being paid money not to refer patients to hospital, including cancer referrals, in order to cut costs.

One clinical commissioning group reportedly offered more than £11,000 to slash everything from follow-ups and emergency admissions; another more than £6,000 to GP surgeries to bring their referrals down to practices at the bottom of the league for referral rates.

This is playing with people’s lives.

Britain is already languishing up to two decades behind the survival rates of other European countries. The NHS should be encouraging more referrals, not incentivising fewer.

The inevitable risk, of course, is that early symptoms of cancer will be missed, leading to even more unnecessary deaths.

If you want to look for other evidence of a healthcare system increasingly under strain, it won’t take you long.

Hearing aids break the solitude of those who are hard of hearing, giving them independence and the ability to carry on life as normal.

But North Staffordshire’s clinical commissioning group is to stop giving free hearing aids to its predominantly older patients.

Again, here is an attempt to save costs in a way that undermines the NHS’s central mission of defending the wellbeing and health of the British people.

Difficult though some will find it to listen to advice from the Liberal Democrats, the ex-health minister Norman Lamb should be listened to when he warns the NHS could face a crash without an emergency injection of billions of pounds.

It is worth considering what the NHS is going through. It has experienced the most protracted squeeze in funding since its foundation in 1948. Cuts to local care services are piling on extra pressure.

It suffers from the combined legacy of private finance initiative (PFI) and the chaos of the Tories’ current marketisation drive, effectively stripping the “National” out of National Health Service.

Despite the Tories’ gimmicky and vague election promises of extra money, our healthcare system is in great danger.

But where is the debate or the scrutiny? It will be health and lives imperilled without an NHS that is properly integrated and resourced.

It would be naive to believe that incentives not to refer cancer patients and the scrapping of free hearing aids is the end of it.

The direction of travel is clear, and it should scandalise us.