Don't patients have any rights in the NHS today?
Are doctors and nurses the only ones who have rights here?
Striking didn't help workers in UK-owned car-making, shipbuilding and coal mining. It hastened their demise.
The Government has an overriding responsibility to protect the value of the money in your pocket. If they fail you, you kick them out. You don't make their job more difficult unless you are a saboteur.
The big mistake was in 1948, making the Treasury responsible for finding the money with rival claims on it. True national health insurance overcomes that.
And the NHS isn't safe with Labour either!
In 2004 their deal with the BMA freed GPs from their responsibility for their patients at weekends and evenings, private enterprise GPs at twice the cost minding the gap! It broke the sovereign link between you and a doctor who knows you. A & E at weekends, its own casualty!
PFI contracts to balance the books and waste money.
No money for social care at all because, in 1948, people didn't live long enough to need it. A National Health Insurance scheme with no age limit and competing insurance companies providing the bulk of the funds would drive up standards and pay for social care from day one. Dentists would not be forgotten.
No fault negligence claims would save a vast amount of time and money and leave the medical profession to correct its mistakes instead of wasting time defending them.
And today, we have no responsibility for our own health, sharing it with the State. The key to keeping costs down.
END THE MYTH THAT ALL THE NHS NEEDS IS STILL MORE MONEY.
Poet, essayist, story writer, poetry editor, skeptic; author of The gleaming clouds. Brisbane: Interactive Press, 2013
1 年It seems you are looking to America, alan, where all rests on private medicine and privare insurance, where the national health outcome is declining, yet the costs rising. And all but the well-to-do and the comfortably off find medical care beyond their means. Life expectancy in the USA is declining, to where it is a good five years shorter than in Australia. Not that my country is a health paradise. The illness of Britain's NHS has more to do with 'Conservative' governments failing to conserve by creeping neglect of funding while allowing money to decline in value.
Author | Death of a Nightingale | Law, Politics, Business
1 年And the NHS isn't safe with Labour either!