Matched only by Tony Blair, Alan Milburn and Paul Corrigan, Jeremy Hunt has done as much as anyone to privatise the NHS in England.
Yet his appointment is still an admission that no one in the Tufton Street "libertarian" cult was capable of being Chancellor of the Exchequer. It's over.
A coup rarely lasts very long, usually because the constituency for which it had presumed to act had failed to rise in support of it after all. The City and the money markets have risen, all right. But not in support of the putsch.
If you think that they and the "independent" Bank of England ought not to have this sort of power, then welcome to the club.
"privatise the NHS in England."
ReplyDeleteNot this old baloney again. As I've explained here before, this is the biggest lie in history. No party or Minister has ever suggested abolishing the principle of healthcare free at the point of use (which it is in all advanced Western economies too) and we indeed already pay insurance for our health and social care (it's called National Insurance and Boris's government was just about to hike it precisely to pay for that care). So by "privatising the NHS" what you actually mean is just the involvement of some private providers in (taxpayer-funded) provision free at the point of use.
Hardly privatizing, is it? What we should be doing is swapping National Insurance for personal health insurance, as they have all over the continent, which would be means-tested just as National Insurance is but would give the paying patients choice over where and when they were treated.
Healthcare would remain free at the point of use as it is in every advanced economy but the costs would be lower, patients would have more power and our recovery and mortality rates would be closer to those on the Continent which are far better than here.
Stand for election on that one. Go on. I dare you.
DeleteEverything I just wrote is true which is why you can’t answer it. The “privatising the NHS” thing is misleading nonsense. Have you ever looked at the recovery and mortality rates here compared to the Continent and then compared the cost of our health system with their more successful ones? As I always point out, there’s a reason no other country in the world has ever tried to copy the NHS…
ReplyDeleteTell that to the voters. Go on. I dare you.
DeleteAs David Davis said the fact voters were willing to accept Boris Johnson’s planned National Insurance rise to pay for health and social care shows people know these things need to be paid for and are willing to pay more for a better service.
ReplyDeleteThe problem is that under our healthcare system they pay too much for a worse service.
Try telling them that. Go on. I dare you.
DeleteI don't intend standing for Parliament but something doesn't only become true if it's electorally popular. My father was recently very ill and we encountered just how bad the NHS is, despite its enormous cost, with my father routinely shunted between wards and even hospitals in the middle of the night to free up beds, and encountering dreadfully unprofessional nurses. I'm not surprised our hospitals rank so low on the international league tables of everything from cancer to heart disease survival rates.
ReplyDeleteYou could carve a better health service than this out of a banana, and at a much lower cost.
The plural of anecdote is not data.
DeleteIndeed, but the data tells the same story about the NHS. A major international study by the Nuffield Trust, the Health Foundation, the Institute for Fiscal Studies and The King’s Fund found: "The UK’s NHS performs worse than the international average in the treatment of 8 out of the 12 most common causes of death, including deaths within 30 days of having a heart attack and within five years of being diagnosed with breast cancer, rectal cancer, colon cancer, pancreatic cancer and lung cancer, despite narrowing the gap in recent years. It is the third poorest performer compared to the 18 developed countries on the overall rate at which people die when successful medical care could have saved their lives (known as ‘amenable mortality’).
ReplyDeleteIt has consistently higher rates of death for babies at birth or just after (perinatal mortality), and in the month after birth (neonatal mortality): 7 in 1000 babies died at birth or in the week afterwards in the UK in 2016, compared to an average of 5.5 across the comparator countries.
The UK is in the middle of the pack when it comes to the length of time people wait for treatment: people requiring a hip replacement waited around 97 days in the UK in 2015, compared to 42 days in the Netherlands. "
Oh, well, you do have Jeremy Hunt running the country now.
Delete