Tom Scholes - Fogg NHS Privatisation Meeting With David Came

[norbert]

If you are unlucky to fall or be injured in 2010 or in later years

http://www.tomscholesfogg.co.uk/?p=426" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

“On the first day of your government, you should close down the BBC. You should take it off air. You should disclaim its copyrights. You should throw all its staff into the street. You should not try to privatise the BBC. This would simply be to transfer the voice of your enemy from the public to the private sector, where it might be more effective in its opposition. You must shut it down – and shut it down at once. You should do the same with much of the administration. The Foreign Office, much of the Home Office, the Commission for Racial Equality, anything to do with health and safety and planning and child protection – I mean much of the public sector – these should be shut down. If at the end of your first month in power, you have not shut down half of the State, you are failing. If you have shut down half the State, you have made a step in the right direction, and are ready for still further cuts.”

“Following from this, however, I advise you to leave large areas of the welfare state alone. It is regrettable, but most people in this country do like the idea of healthcare free at the point of use, and of free education, and of pensions and unemployment benefit. These must go in the long term. But they must be retained in the short term to maintain electoral support. Their cost and methods of provision should be examined. But cutting welfare provision would be politically unwise in the early days of our revolution.”

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http://www.nursesforreformblog.com/2009 ... -from-nfr/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

A good response ?

MattLeese 1 week ago
Privitisation usually means much higher wages for those at the top and lower wages for everyone else. It also means better treatment for those with the most money and much worse treatment for everyone else. I also wish right-wingers who quote this "faster and cheaper" mantra about capitalism would think a bit before applying it to everything. Sure, it works for most things, but it doesn't automatically follow that you can apply this to healthcare. The key to improvement in any economic system is specialisation and the promotion of economies of scale. Well, the NHS has plenty of economies of scale, and has the balance about right between providing every type of healthcare everywhere whilst having specialist units available within reasonable reach of most people. Privitisation will probably mean too many smaller hospitals pointlessly duplicating resources and over-equiping, providing a choice that only comes at a big price.

Some "socialised" supply actualy works very well, mainly where the scale is so huge that only one supplier can effectively do it. France, for instance, has "socialised" electricity supply, and some of the cheapest electricity in the world (and carbon-free as well!). The NHS costs $3000 per person in the UK. The US system costs $7000. Is their free-market miracle more than twice as good as our 'soviet' NHS? Er, no. In terms of efficiency it would appear that the free-market fails miserably when it comes to healthcare.

I hope very much that your organisation fails to gain any influence over British politics, though, sadly, I fear that the Tories have many changes up their sleeve which they are not telling us about, including the implementaion of ideologically-driven healthcare reforms that will mean more beaurocracy for individuals (I don't want to have to fill in a form every time I go to a hospital) and greatly increased cost with little discernable benefit to our health.

You talk of the NHS as a "rationed and expensive world of top-down and un-innovative state control". How can any system ever hope to eliminate rationing? In the US the rationing is based on how much you want to pay. Rationing will always exist, it just depends how you want to do it. The NHS is NOT expensive; on the contrary it's very cheap for what it does. And in terms of innovation the NHS uses all the latest medical practises.

The changes I would support include allowing people to register with any GP and allowing primary care providers to buy in services from the private sector if they wish. But I also think that basic dental and eye care should be 'socialised' and brough into the NHS so that everyone can have decent teeth and be able to see properly.