NHS Reforms? What NHS Reforms?
Fingers crossed for a vote against
You’d think that when Parliament was on the verge of passing a bill to effectively abolish the NHS it would be front page news, but apparently not. By the time you’re reading this, the House of Lords will have decided whether or not to pass the 2011 Health and Social Care Bill. For both your sake and mine I hope they have not; here’s why.
Firstly, the bill will eliminate the duty of the Secretary of State to provide free and comprehensive healthcare for British residents. That is to say, the Government could, whenever it felt like it, stop giving money to the NHS, and they could either sell it or abolish it completely.
Secondly, the Government would no longer be able to intervene if the NHS were to provide poor healthcare in a particular constituency. All this responsibility would be shifted to an unelected combination of GPs and private companies. The NHS itself would effectively become a private company with arbitrary Government subsidies.
Thirdly, any behaviour in the NHS that is deemed anti-competitive (that is, unprofitable) must legally be stopped. This is all the more heinous since the NHS was never intended to make a profit, and it certainly doesn’t make a profit today. The entire NHS could be abolished under this rule.
Fourthly, there would no longer be a limit on the amount of profit a hospital can make from providing private healthcare alongside free healthcare. That is, there would be nothing to stop an NHS hospital charging money for everything and anything.
Hopefully these four issues are self-evidently problematic. Possibly more problematic, however, has been the public reaction to this bill. On Saturday and Sunday, I read from front to back my Dad’s copies of The Times, and not once were the impending NHS reforms mentioned. In fact, I only became aware of the existence of this Bill by trawling through the lesser-viewed sections of The Guardian’s website.
Why this appalling piece of legislation hasn’t received more media attention in the week building up to the House of Lords debate is beyond me, and all we can hope for is that they stop the bill before it can become law. If they don’t, then the only thing standing between us and a future of US-style private healthcare is the Queen; and since taxpayers already pay for her spa treatments, I don’t think she’ll give the bill so much as a second glance as she descends into the bubbles.
